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BY 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 




WTi SB 



BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD S- CO. 

MCMVll 




iMy IDear WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY, 

E are all busy in this world building 
Towers of ^abel ; and the child of 
ourimaginatioyis isalways a change- 
ling when it comes from nurse. This is not 
only true in the greatest, as of wars and fo- 
lios, but in the least also, like the trifling vol- 
ume inyour hand. Thus I began to write these 
papers with a definite end : I was to be the Ad- 
vocatus, not I hope Diaboli, ^/// Juventutis; 
/ was to state temperately the beliefs of youth 
as opposed to the contentions of age; to go over 
all the field where the two differ, and produce 
at last a little volume of Special pleadings 
which I might call, without misnomer , Life at 
Twenty-five, ^ut times kept changing, and I 
shared in the change. I clung hard to that en- 
trancing age; but, with the best will, no man 
can be twenty-five for ever. The old, ruddy 
convictions deserted me, and, along with 
them, the style that fits their presentation 
and defence, I saw, and indeed my friends 



DEDICA TION 

informed me, that the game was up. zA good 
part of the volume -would answer to the long- 
projected title; hut the shadows of the pris- 
on-house are on the rest. 

It is good to have been young in youth and, 
as years go on, to grow older. [Many are al- 
ready old before they are through their teens; 
but to travel deliberately through one's ages 
is to get the heart out of a liberal education. 
Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, 
and still this world appears a brave gymna- 
sium, full of sea-bathing, and horse exercise, 
and bracing, manly virtues; and what can be 
more encouraging than to find the friend who 
ivas welcome at one age, still welcome at an- 
other? Our affections and beliefs are wiser 
than we; the best that is in us is better than 
we can understand; for it is grounded beyond 
experience, and guides tts, blindfold but safe, 
from one age on to another. 

These papers are like milestones on the way- 
side of my life; and as I look back in mem- 
ory, there is hardly a stage of that distance 
but I see you present with advice, reproof, 
and praise. [Meanwhile, many things have 
changed, you and I among the rest; but I hope 



DEDICA TION 

that our sympathy , founded on the Jove of our 
art , andnourishedhy mutual assistance , shall 
survive these little revolutions undiminished, 
and, with God's help, unite us to the end, 
Davos Platz, 1881 % L S. 




FIRST COLLECTED EDITION 

C. Kegan Paul &Co., London, 1881 

Originally Published 

I Cornhill Magazine, i, August, 1876. 
Cornhill Magazine, iii, February, 1877. 
Cornhill Magazine, iv, May, 1879. 

II Cornhill Magazine, March, 1878. 

III Cornhill Magazine, July, 1877. 

IV Macmillan's Magazine, May, 1874. 

V Cornhill Magazine, April, 1878. 

VI London Magazine, May 11, 1878. 

VII Cornhill Magazine, July, 1878. 

VIII In First Colleded Edition, 1881. 

IX Cornhill Magazine, September, 1878. 

X Cornhill Magazine, June, 1876. 

XI London Magazine, May 4, 1876. 

XII London Magazine, April 27, 1878. 



van 





CONTENTS 




I ' 


' VlRGINIBUS PUERISQUE " 






Chapter I 


I 




Chapter 11 


23 




Chapter III : On Falling in Love 


40 




Chapter IV : Truth of Intercourse 


58 


II 


Crabbed Age and Youth 


75 


III 


An Apology For Idlers 


99 


IV 


Ordi^red South 


118 


V 


/Es Triplex 


141 


VI 


El Dorado 


158 


VII 


The English Admirals 


164 


VIII 


Some Portraits by Raeburn 


188 


IX 


Child's Play 


204 


X 


Walking Tours 


225 


XI 


Pan's Pipes 


241 


XII 


A Plea For Gas Lamps 


249 




"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE" 
I 

ITH the single exception of Falstaff, 
all Shakespeare's charaders are 
what we call marrying men. Mercu- 
tio, as he was own cousin to Benedick and 
Biron, would have come to the same end in 
the long run. Even lago had a wife, and, what 
is far stranger, he was jealous. People like 
Jacques and the Fool in Lear, although we 
can hardly imagine they would ever marry, 
kept single out of a cynical humour or for a 
broken heart, and not, as we do nowadays, 
from a spirit of incredulity and preference 
for the single state. For that matter, if you 
turn to George Sand's French version oi As 
You Like It (and I think 1 can promise you 
will like it but little), you will find Jacques 
marries Celia just as Orlando marries Rosa- 
lind. 

At least there seems to have been much 
less hesitation over marriage in Shakes- 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

peare's days; and what hesitation there was 
was of a laughing sort, and not much more 
serious, one way or the other, than that of 
Panurge. In modern comedies the heroes 
are mostly of Benedick's way of thinking, 
but twice as much in earnest, and not one 
quarter so confident. And I take this diffi- 
dence as a proof of how sincere their terror 
is. They know they are only human after 
all; they know what gins and pitfalls lie 
about their feet; and how the shadow of 
matrimony waits, resolute and awful, at the 
cross-roads. They would wish to keep their 
liberty; but if that may not be, why, God's 
will be done ! "What, are you afraid of mar- 
riage.? "asks Cecile, in Maitre Guerin. " Oh, 
mon Dieu, non!" replies Arthur; "1 should 
take chloroform. " They look forward to mar- 
riage much in the same way as they prepare 
themselves for death : each seems inevitable ; 
each is a great Perhaps, and a leap into the 
dark, for which, when a man is in the blue 
devils, he has specially to harden his heart. 
That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trail- 
les, took the news of marriages much as an 
old man hears the deaths of his contempor- 



" VIRGINIB US P UERISQ UE " 

aries. *'C'estdesesperant," he cried, throw- 
ing himself down in the arm-chair at Ma- 
dame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous 
nous marions tous!" Every marriage was 
like another gray hair on his head; and the 
jolly church bells seemed to taunt him with 
his fifty years and fair round belly. 

The fact is, we are much more afraid of 
life than our ancestors, and cannot find it 
in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. 
Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and 
forlorn old age. The friendships of men are 
vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You 
know all ihe time that one friend will marry 
and put you to the door; a second accept 
a situation in China, and become no more 
to you than a name, a reminiscence, and an 
occasional crossed letter, very laborious to 
read ; a third will take up with some religious 
crotchet and treat you to sour looks thence- 
forward. So, in one way or another, life 
forces men apart and breaks up the goodly 
fellowships forever. The very flexibility and 
ease which make men's friendships so agree- 
able while they endure, make them the easier 
to destroy and forget. And a man who has 

3 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

afewfriends, or one who has a dozen (if there 
be anyone so wealthy on this earth), can- 
not forget on how precarious a base his hap- 
piness reposes ; and how by a stroke or two 
of fate — a death, a few light words, a piece 
of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes — 
he may be left, in a month, destitute of all. 
Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. In- 
stead of on two or three, you stake your 
happiness on one life only. But still, as the 
bargain is more explicit and complete on 
your part, it is more so on the other; and 
you have not to fear so many contingencies; 
it is not every wind that can blow you from 
your anchorage; and so long as Death with- 
holds his sickle, you will always have a 
friend at home. People who share a cell in 
the Bastile, or are thrown together on an 
uninhabited isle, if they do not immediately 
fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible 
ground of compromise. They will learn each 
other's ways and humours, so as to know 
where they must go warily, and where they 
may lean their whole weight. The dis- 
cretion of the first years becomes the settled 
habit of the last; and so^ with wisdom and 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

patience, two lives may grow indissolubly 
into one. 

But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all 
heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the 
spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man 
becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes 
a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It 
is not only when Lydgate misallies himself 
with Rosamond Vincy, but when Ladislaw 
marries above him with Dorothea, that this 
may be exemplified. The air of the fireside 
withers out all the fine wildings of the hus- 
band's heart. He is so comfortable and happy 
that he begins to prefer comfort and happi- 
ness to everything else on earth, his wife 
included. Yesterday he would have shared 
his last shilling; to-day "his first duty is to 
his family," and is fulfilled in large measure 
by laying down vintages and husbanding 
the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty 
years ago this man was equally capable of 
crime or heroism; now he is fit for neither. 
His soul is asleep, and you may speak with- 
out constraint; you will not wake him. It 
is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a 
bachelor and Marcus Aurehus married ill. 

5 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

For women, there is less of this danger. 
Marriage is of so much use to a woman, 
opens out to her so much more of life, and 
puts her in the way of so much more free- 
dom and usefulness, that, whether she marry 
ill or well, she can hardly miss some bene- 
fit. It is true, however, that some of the 
merriest and most genuine of women are 
old maids; and that those old maids, and 
wives who are unhappily married, have 
often most of the true motherly touch. And 
this would seem to show, even for women, 
some narrowing influence in comfortable 
married life. But the rule is none the less 
certain: if you wish the pick of men and 
women, take a good bachelor and a good 
wife. 

I am often filled with wonder that so 
many marriages are passably successful, and 
so few come to open failure, the more so as 
I fail to understand the principle on which 
people regulate their choice. I see women 
marrying indiscriminately with staring bur- 
gesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed boys, 
and men dwell in contentment with noisy 
scullions, or taking into their lives acidu- 
6 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

lous vestals. It is a common answer to say 
the good people marry because they fall in 
love; and of course you may use and mis- 
use a word as much as you please, if you 
have the world along with you. But love is 
at least a somewhat hyperbolical expression 
for such lukewarm preference. It is not here, 
anyway, that Love employs his golden 
shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness 
of language, to reign here and revel. In- 
deed, if this be love at all, it is plain the 
poets have been fooling with mankind since 
the foundation of the world. And you have 
only to look these happy couples in the 
face, to see they have never been in love, 
or in hate, or in any other high passion, all 
their days. When you see a dish of fruit at 
dessert, you sometimes set your affections 
upon one particular peach or nedarine, 
watch it with some anxiety as it comes 
round the table, and feel quite a sensible 
disappointment when it is taken by some 
one else. I have used the phrase '' high pas- 
sion." Well, I should say this was about as 
high a passion as generally leads to mar- 
riage. One husband hears after marriage 

7 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

that some poor fellow is dying of his wife's 
love. "What a pity!" he exclaims; ''you 
know I could so easily have got another!" 
And yet that is a very happy union. Or again : 
A young man was telling me the sweet 
story of his loves. " 1 like it well enough as 
long as her sisters are there," said this 
amorous swain; *'but 1 don't know what 
to do when we're alone." Once more: A 
married lady was debating the subject with 
another lady. "You know, dear," said the 
first, "after ten years of marriage, if he is 
nothing else, your husband is always an old 
friend." "I have many old friends," re- 
turned the other, "but I prefer them to be 
nothing more." "Oh, perhaps 1 m\^\ pre- 
fer that also!" There is a common note in 
these three illustrations of the modern idyll ; 
and it must be owned the god goes among 
us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You 
wonder whether it was so always; whether 
desire was always equally dull and spirit- 
less, and possession equally cold. I cannot 
help fancying most people make, ere they 
marry, some such table of recommenda- 
tions as Hannah Godwin wrote to her 
8 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay. 
It is so charmingly comical, and so pat to 
the occasion, that I must quote a few 
phrases. " The young lady is in every sense 
formed to make one of your disposition 
really happy. She has a pleasing voice, with 
which she accompanies her musical instru- 
ment with judgment. She has an easy po- 
liteness in her manners, neither free nor re- 
served. She is a good housekeeper and a 
good economist, and yet of a generous dis- 
position. As to her internal accomplish- 
ments, 1 have reason to speak still more 
highly of them : good sense without vanity, 
a penetrating judgment without a disposi- 
tion to satire, with about as much religion 
as my William likes, struck me with a wish 
that she was my William's wife." That is 
about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate 
good looks, unimpeachable internal accom- 
plishments after the style of the copybook, 
with about as much rehgion as my William 
likes; and then, with all speed, to church. 
To deal plainly, if they only married when 
they fell in love, most people would die 
unwed; and among the others, there would 

9 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

be not a few tumultuous households. The 
Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely 
suitable for a domestic pet. In the same 
way, I susped love is rather too violent a 
passion to make, in all cases, a good do- 
mestic sentiment. Like other violent excite- 
ments, it throws up not only what is best, 
but what is worst and smallest, in men's 
charaders. Just as some people are mali- 
cious in drink, or brawling and virulent un- 
der the influence of religious feehng, some 
are moody, jealous, and exading when they 
are in love, who are honest, downright, 
good-hearted fellows enough in the every- 
day affairs and humours of the world. 

How then, seeing we are driven to the 
hypothesis that people choose in compara- 
tively cold blood, how is it that they choose 
so well ? One is almost tempted to hint 
that it does not much matter whom you 
marry; that, in fact, marriage is a subjec- 
tive affection, and if you have made up 
your mind to it, and once talked yourself 
fairly over, you could ''pull it through" 
with anybody. But even if we take matri- 
mony at its lowest, even if we regard it as 



" VI R GIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

no more than a sort of friendship recog- 
nised by the police, there must be degrees 
in the freedom and sympathy realised, and 
some principle to guide simple folk in their 
selection. Now what should this principle 
be ? Are there no more definite rules than 
are to be found in the Prayer-book ? Law 
and religion forbid the bans on the ground 
of propinquity or consanguinity; society 
steps in to separate classes; and in all this 
most critical matter, has common sense, 
has wisdom, never a word to say ? In the 
absence of more magisterial teaching, let 
us talk it over between friends: even a few 
guesses may be of interest to youths and 
maidens. 

In all that concerns eating and drinking, 
company, climate, and ways of life, com- 
munity of taste is to be sought for. It would 
be trying, for instance, to keep bed and 
board with an early riser or a vegetarian. 
In matters of art and intellect, I believe it is 
of no consequence. Certainly it is of none in 
the companionships of men, who will dine 
more readily with one who has a good 
heart, a good cellar, and a humorous tongue, 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

than with another who shares all their fa- 
vourite hobbies and is melancholy withal. If 
your wife likes Tupper, that is no reason 
why you should hang your head. She thinks 
with the majority, and has the courage of 
her opinions. 1 have always suspected pub- 
lic taste to be a mongrel product out of af- 
fectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if 
you could only find an honest man of no 
special literary bent, he would tell you he 
thought much of Shakespeare bombastic 
and most absurd, and all of him written in 
very obscure English and wearisome to 
read. And not long ago 1 was able to lay 
by my lantern in content, for 1 found the 
honest man. He was a fellow of parts, 
quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with 
an eye for certain poetical effeds of sea and 
ships. I am not much of a judge of that 
kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes 
before me sometimes at night. How strong, 
supple, and living the ship seems upon the 
billows! With what a dip and rake she 
shears the flying sea! I cannot fancy the 
man who saw this effed, and took it on 
the wing with so much force and spirit, 



' VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

was what you call commonplace in the last 
recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, 
and was not ashamed to have it known of 
him, that Ouida was better in every way 
than William Shakespeare. If there were 
more people of his honesty, this would be 
about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste 
that is plentiful, but courage that is rare. 
And what have we in place ? How many, 
who think no otherwise than the young 
painter, have we not heard disbursing sec- 
ond-hand hyperboles ? Have you never 
turned sick at heart, O best of critics ! when 
some ">f your own sweet adjeftives were 
returned on you before a gaping audience ? 
Enthusiasm about art is become a fun(5lion 
of the average female being, which she per- 
forms with precision and a sort of haunting 
sprightliness, like an ingenious and well- 
regulated machine. Sometimes, alas! the 
calmest man is carried away in the torrent, 
bandies adjedives with the best, and out- 
Herods Herod for some shameful moments. 
When you remember that, you will be 
tempted to put things strongly, and say 
you will marry no one who is not like 

13 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

George the Second, and cannot state open- 
ly a distaste for poetry and painting. 

The word "fads" is, in some ways, cru- 
cial. 1 have spoken with Jesuits and Ply- 
mouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, 
dogmatic republicans and dear old gentle- 
men in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each un- 
derstood the word ''fads" in an occult 
sense of his own. Try as 1 might, 1 could 
get no nearer the principle of their division. 
What was essential to them, seemed to me 
trivial or untrue. We could come to no com- 
promise as to what was, or what was not, 
important in the life of man. Turn as we 
pleased, we all stood back to back in a big 
ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, 
with different mountain-tops along the sky- 
line and different constellations overhead. 
We had each of us some whimsy in the 
brain, which we believed more than any- 
thing else, and which discoloured all experi- 
ence to its own shade. How would you have 
people agree, when one is deaf and the other 
blind? Now this is where there should be 
community between man and wife. They 
should be agreed on their catchword in 
14 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

''fa^s of religion/' or ''faSls of science/' or 
''society, my dear"; for without such an 
agreement all intercourse is a painful strain 
upon the mind. "About as much religion 
as my William likes," in short, that is what 
is necessary to make a happy couple of any 
William and his spouse. For there are dif- 
ferences which no habit nor affedion can 
reconcile, and the Bohemian must not in- 
termarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Con- 
suelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of 
the successful merchant! The best of men 
and the best of women may sometimes live 
together all their lives, and, for want of 
some consent on fundamental questions, 
hold each other lost spirits to the end. 

A certain sort of talent is almost indispen- 
sable for people who would spend years 
together and not bore themselves to death. 
But the talent, like the agreement, must be 
for and about life. To dwell happily to- 
gether, they should be versed in the nice- 
ties of the heart, and born with a faculty 
for willing compromise. The woman must 
be talented as a woman, and it will not 
much matter although she is talented in 

>5 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

nothing else. She must know her metier de 
femme, and have a fine touch for the affec- 
tions. And it is more important that a per- 
son should be a good gossip, and talk 
pleasantly and smartly of common friends 
and the thousand and one nothings of the 
day and hour, than that she should speak 
with the tongues of men and angels; for a 
while together by the fire, happens more 
frequently in marriage than the presence of 
a distinguished foreigner to dinner. That 
people should laugh over the same sort of 
jests, and have many a story of ''grouse in 
the gun-room," many an old joke between 
them which time cannot wither nor custom 
stale, is abetter preparation for life, by your 
leave, than many other things higher and 
better sounding in the world's ears. You 
could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted ; 
but you must share a joke with some one 
else. You can forgive people who do not 
follow you through a philosophical disquisi- 
tion; but to find your wife laughing when 
you had tears in your eyes, or staring when 
you were in a fit of laughter, would go some 
way towards a dissolution of the marriage. 

i6 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

I know a woman who, from some dis- 
taste or disability, could never so much as 
understand the meaning of the word poli- 
tics, and has given up trying to distinguish 
Whigs from Tories ; but take her on her own 
politics, ask her about other men or women 
and the chicanery of everyday existence — 
the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which 
life turns — and you will not find many more 
shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to 
make plainer what 1 have in mind, this same 
woman has a share of the higher and more 
poetical understanding, frank interest in 
things for their own sake, and enduring 
astonishment at the most common. She is 
not to be deceived by custom, or made to 
think a mystery solved when it is repeated. 
I have heard her say she could wonder her- 
self crazy over the human eyebrow. Nov/ 
in a world where most of us walk very con- 
tentedly in the little lit circle of their own 
reason, and have to be reminded of what 
lies without by specious and clamant ex- 
ceptions^ — earthquakes, eruptions of Vesu- 
vius, banjos floating in mid-air at a seance, 
and the like — a mind so fresh and unso- 

'7 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

phisticated is no despicable gift. I will own 
I think it a better sort of mind than goes 
necessarily with the clearest views on pub- 
lic business. It will wash. It will find some- 
thing to say at an odd moment. It has in it 
the spring of pleasant and quaint fancies. 
Whereas 1 can imagine myself yawning all 
night long until my jaws ached and the tears 
came into my eyes, although my companion 
on the other side of the hearth held the most 
enlightened opinions on the franchise or the 
ballot. 

The question of professions, in as far as 
they regard marriage, was only interesting 
to women until of late days, but it touches 
all of us now. Certainly, if I could help it, 
I would never marry a wife who wrote. 
The practice of letters is miserably harass- 
ing to the mind; and after an hour or two's 
work, all the more human portion of the 
author is extind; he will bully, backbite, 
and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not 
much better. But painting, on the contrary, 
is often highly sedative; because so much 
of the labour, after your picture is once be- 
gun, is almost entirely manual, and of that 



" VIRGIN IB us PUE RISQUE " 
skilled sort of manual labour which offers a 
continual series of successes, and so tickles 
a man, through his vanity, into good hu- 
mour. Alas ! in letters there is nothing of this 
sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as 
you will, you have always something else 
to think of, and cannot pause to notice your 
loops and flourishes; they are beside the 
mark, and the first law stationer could put 
you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made 
some account of penmanship, even made it 
a source of livehhood, when he copied out 
the Heloise for dilettante ladies ; and there* 
in showed that strange eccentric prudence 
which guided him among so many thousand 
follies and insanities. It would be well for 
all of the genus irritabile thus to add some- 
thing of skilled labour to intangible brain- 
work. To find the right word is so doubtful 
a success and hes so near to failure, that 
there is no satisfaction in a year of it; but 
we all know when we have formed a letter 
perfectly ; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, 
is almost equally certain he has found a right 
tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous 
stroke with his brush. And, again, painters 

19 



" VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE " 

may work out of doors; and the fresh air, 
the dehberate seasons, and the "tranquilHs- 
ing influence " of the green earth, counter- 
balance the fever of thought, and keep them 
cool, placable, and prosaic. 

A ship captain is a good man to marry if 
it is a marriage of love, for absences are a 
good influence in love and keep it bright 
and delicate; but he is just the worst man 
if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is 
too frequently torn open and the solder has 
never time to set. Men who fish, botanise, 
work with the turning-lathe, or gather 
sea-weeds, will make admirable husbands; 
and a little amateur painting in water-col- 
our shows the innocent and quiet mind. 
Those who have a few intimates are to be 
avoided ; while those who swim loose, who 
have their hat in their hand all along the 
street, who can number an infinity of ac- 
quaintances and are not chargeable with 
any one friend, promise an easy disposition 
and no rival to the wife's influence. I will 
not say they are the best of men, but they 
are the stuff out of which adroit and capable 
women manufacture the best of husbands. 



" VIRGIN IB us PUERISQUE " 

It is to be noticed that those who have 
loved once or twice already are so much 
the better educated to a woman's hand ; 
the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most 
uncomfortable mixture of shyness and 
coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising. 
Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden 
rule), no woman should marry a teeto- 
taller, or a man who does not smoke. It is 
not for nothing that this " ignoble tabagie," 
as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the 
world. Michelet rails against it because it 
renders you happy apart from thought or 
work, to provident women this will seem 
no evil influence in married life. Whatever 
keeps a man in the front garden, whatever 
checks wandering fancy and all inordinate 
ambition, whatever makes for lounging and 
contentment, makes just so surely for do- 
mestic happiness. 

These notes, if they amuse the reader at 
all, will probably amuse him more when 
he differs than when he agrees with them; 
at least they will do no harm, for nobody 
will follow my advice. But the last word is 
of more concern. Marriage is a step so grave 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

and decisive that it attrads light-headed, 
variable men by its very awfulness. They 
have been so tried among the inconstant 
squalls and currents, so often sailed for isl- 
ands in the air or lain becalmed with burn- 
ing heart, that they will risk all for solid 
ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, 
they run their sea-sick, weary bark upon 
the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage 
were the royal road through life, and 
realised, on the instant, what we have all 
dreamed on summer Sundays when the 
bells ring, or at night when we cannot 
sleep for the desire of living. They think it 
will sober and change them. Like those 
who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs 
but an ad to be out of the coil and clamour 
for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. 
To the end, spring winds will sow dis- 
quietude, passing faces leave a regret behind 
them, and the whole world keep calling and 
calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in 
this — that it is a field of battle, and not a 
bed of roses. 



22 




"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE" 
II 

•OPE, they say, deserts us at no pe- 
riod of our existence. From first to 
last, and in the face of smarting dis- 
illusions, we continue to exped good for- 
tune, better health and better conduct; and 
that so confidently, that we judge it need- 
less to deserve them. I think it improbable 
that 1 shall ever write like Shakespeare, 
condud an army like Hannibal, or distin- 
guish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the 
paths of virtue ; and yet 1 have my by-days, 
hope prompting, when I am very ready to 
believe that I shall combine all these vari- 
ous excellences in my own person, and go 
marching down to posterity with divine 
honours. There is nothing so monstrous 
but we can believe it of ourselves. About 
ourselves, about our aspirations and delin- 
quencies, we have dwelt by choice in a 
delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. 

2; 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

No one will have forgotten Tom Sawyer's 
aspiration: *' Ah, if he could only die tem- 
porarily!" Or, perhaps, better still, the in- 
ward resolution of the two pirates, that " so 
long as they remained in that business, 
their piracies should not again be sullied 
with the crime of stealing." Here we rec- 
ognise the thoughts of our boyhood; and 
our boyhood ceased — well, when ? — not, 
I think, at twenty; nor perhaps altogether 
at twenty-five ; nor yet at thirty ; and pos- 
sibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the 
thick of that arcadian period. For as the race 
of man, after centuries of civihsation, still 
keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, 
so man, the individual is not altogether 
quit of youth, when he is already old and 
honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. 
We advance in years somewhat in the 
manner of an invading army in a barren 
land; the age that we have reached, as the 
phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, 
and still keep open our communications 
with the extreme rear and first beginnings 
of the march. There is our true base; that 
is not only the beginning, but the peren- 

24 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE'' 

nial spring of our faculties; and grandfather 
William can retire upon occasion into the 
green enchanted forest of his boyhood. 

The unfading boyishness of hope and its 
vigorous irrationality are nowhere better 
displayed than in the questions of condud. 
There is a charader in the Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress, one Mr. Linger-after-Lt^st with whom 
I fancy we are all on speaking terms; one 
famous among the famous for ingenuity of 
hope up to and beyond the moment of de- 
feat; one who, after eighty years of con- 
trary experience, will believe it possible to 
continue in the business of piracy and yet 
avoid the guilt of theft. Every sin is our last; 
every 1st of January a remarkable turning 
point in our career. Any overt ad, above all, 
is felt to be alchemic in its power to change. 
A drunkard takes the pledge; it will be 
strange if that does not help him. For how 
many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make 
and break his little vows ? And yet I have not 
heard that he was discouraged in the end. By 
such steps we think to fix a momentary res- 
olution ; as a timid fellow hies him to the den- 
tist's while the tooth is stinging. 

25 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

But, alas, by planting a stake at the top 
of flood, you can neither prevent nor delay 
the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus 
in morality; and even the " san(5limonious 
ceremony " of marriage leaves the man un- 
changed. This is a hard saying, and has an 
air of paradox. For there is something in 
marriage so natural and inviting, that the 
step has an air of great simplicity and ease; 
it offers to bury forever many aching pre- 
occupations; it is to afford us unfailing and 
familiar company through life; it opens up 
a smiling prospect of the blest and passive 
kind of love, rather than the blessing and 
aflive; it is approached not only through 
the delights of courtship, but by a public 
performance and repeated legal signatures. 
A man naturally thinks it will go hard with 
him if he cannot be good and fortunate and 
happy within such august circumvallations. 

And yet there is probably no other ad in 
a man's life so hot-headed and foolhardy as 
this one of marriage. For years, let us sup- 
pose, you have been making the most in- 
different business of your career. Your ex- 
perience has not, we may dare to say, been 
26 



" VIRGINIB US P UERISQ UE " 

more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's; 
like them, you have seen and desired the 
good that you were not able to accomplish; 
like them, you have done the evil that you 
loathed. You have waked at night in a hot 
or a cold sweat, according to your habit of 
body, remembering, with dismal surprise, 
your own unpardonable a6ls and sayings. 
You have been sometimes tempted to with- 
draw entirely from this game of life; as a 
man who makes nothing but misses with- 
draws from that less dangerous one of bil- 
liards. You have fallen back upon the 
thought that you yourself most sharply 
smarted for your misdemeanors, or, in the 
old, plaintive phrase, that you were no- 
body's enemy but your own. And then you 
have been made aware of what was beau- 
tiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the 
other part of your behaviour; and it seemed 
as if nothing could reconcile the contradic- 
tion, as indeed nothing can. If you are a 
man, you have shut your mouth hard and 
said nothing; and if you are only a man in 
the making, you have recognised that yours 
was quite a special case, and you yourself 

27 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

not guilty of your own pestiferous career. 
Granted, and with all my heart. Let us 
accept these apologies ; let us agree that you 
are nobody's enemy but your own; let us 
agree that you are a sort of moral cripple, 
impotent for good; and let us regard you 
with the unmingled pity due to such a fate. 
But there is one thing to which, on these 
terms we can never agree: — we can never 
agree to have you marry. What! you have 
had one life to manage, and have failed so 
strangely, and now can see nothing wiser 
than to conjoin with it the management of 
some one else's.^ Because you have been un- 
faithful in a very little, you propose yourself 
to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip your- 
self by such a step of all remaining consola- 
tions and excuses. You are no longer content 
to be your own enemy; you must be your 
wife's also. You have been hitherto in a 
mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel blows 
about you in life, yet only half responsible, 
since you came there by no choice or move- 
ment of your own. Now, it appears, you 
must take things on your own authority: 
God made you, but you marry yourself; and 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

for all that your wife suffers, no one is re- 
sponsible but you. A man must be very cer- 
tain of his knowledge ere he undertakes to 
guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dan- 
gerous pass ; you have eternally missed your 
way in life, with consequences that you still 
deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your 
wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag her after 
you to ruin. And it is your wife, you ob- 
serve, whom you select. She, whose happi- 
ness you most desire, you choose to be your 
victim. You would earnestly warn her from 
a tottering bridge or bad investment. If she 
were lO marry some one else, how you 
would tremble for her fate ! If she were only 
your sister, and you thought half as much 
of her, how doubtfully would you entrust 
her future to a man no better than yourself! 
Times are changed with him who marries ; 
there are no more by-path meadows, where 
you may innocently linger, but the road lies 
long and straight and dusty to the grave. 
Idleness, which is often becoming and even 
wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a differ- 
ent aspect when you have a wife to support. 
Suppose, after you are married, one of those 

29 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE '* 

little slips were to befall you. What happened 
last November might surely happen Febru- 
ary next. They may have annoyed you at the 
time, because they were not what you had 
meant; but how will they annoy you in the 
future, and how will they shake the fabric of 
your wife's confidence and peace! A thou- 
sand things unpleasing went on in the chiar- 
oscuro of a Hfe that you shrank from too 
particularly realising; you did not care, in 
those days, to make a fetish of your con- 
science; you would recognise your failures 
with a nod, and so, good day. But the time 
for these reserves is over. You have wilfully 
introduced a witness into your life, the scene 
of these defeats, and can no longer close the 
mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but 
must stand up straight and put a name upon 
your adions. And your witness is not only 
the judge, but the vi6lim of your sins; not 
only can she condemn you to the sharpest 
penalties, but she must herself share feel- 
ingly in their endurance. And observe, once 
more, with what temerity you have chosen 
precisely her to be your spy, whose esteem 
you value highest, and whom you have al- 
30 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

ready taught to think you better than you 
are. You may think you had a conscience, 
and beheved in God; but what is a con- 
science, to a wife? Wise men of yore erected 
statues of their deities, and consciously per- 
formed their part in hfe before those marble 
eyes. A god watched them at the board, and 
stood by their bedside in the morning when 
they woke ; and all about their ancient cities, 
where they bought and sold, or where they 
piped and wrestled, there would stand some 
symbol of the things that are outside of man. 
These were lessons, delivered in the quiet 
dialed of art, which told their story faith- 
fully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if you 
will — but how harrowingly taught! — when 
the woman you resped shall weep from your 
unkindness or blush with shame at your 
misconduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their 
painted Madonnas to the wall: you cannot 
set aside your wife. To marry is to domes- 
ticate the Recording Angel. Once you are 
married, there is nothing left for you, not 
even suicide, but to be good. 

And goodness in marriage is a more in- 
tricate problem than mere single virtue; for 

31 



" VIRGIN IB us PUE RISQUE " 

in marriage there are two ideals to be real- 
ised. A girl, it is true, has always lived in 
a glass house among reproving relatives, 
whose word was law; she has been bred 
up to sacrifice her judgments and take the 
key submissively from dear papa; and it 
is wonderful how swiftly she can change 
her tune into the husband's. Her morality 
has been too often an affair of precept and 
conformity. But in the case of a bachelor 
who has enjoyed some measure both of 
privacy and freedom, his moral judgments 
have been passed in some accordance with 
his nature. His sins were always sins in his 
own sight; he could then only sin when he 
did some a6l against his clear convi(5lion; 
the light that he walked by was obscure, 
but it was single. Now, when two people 
of any grit and spirit put their fortunes into 
one, there succeeds to this comparative cer- 
tainty a huge welter of competing jurisdic- 
tions. It no longer matters so much how life 
appears to one; one must consult another; 
one, who may be strong, must not offend 
the other, who is weak. The only weak 
brother I am willing to consider is (to make 
32 



" VIRGIN IBUS P UERISQUE '' 

a bull for once) my wife. For her, and for 
her only, I must waive my righteous judg- 
ments, and go crookedly about my life. How, 
then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, 
to keep honour bright and abstain from base 
capitulations? How are you to put aside 
love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle 
of laxity, to turn suddenly about into the 
rabbi of precision; and after these years of 
ragged pra(5lice, pose for a hero to the lackey 
who has found you out? In this temptation 
to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril 
to morality in married life. Daily they drop 
a little lower from the first ideal, and for a 
while continue to accept these changelings 
with a gross complacency. At last Love 
wakes and looks about him; finds his hero 
sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy 
pawnee; finds his heroine divested of her 
angel brightness ; and in the flash of that first 
disenchantment, flees for ever. 

Again, the husband in these unions is 
usually a man, and the wife commonly 
enough a woman ; and when this is the case, 
although it makes the firmer marriage, a 
thick additional veil of misconception hangs 



" VIRGIN/BUS PUERISQUE " 

above the doubtful business. Women, I be- 
lieve, are somewhat rarer than men; but 
then, if 1 were a woman myself, 1 daresay I 
should hold the reverse; and at least we all 
enter more or less wholly into one or other 
of these camps. A man who delights women 
by his feminine perceptions will often scat- 
ter his admirers by a chance explosion of 
the under side of man ; and the most mascu- 
line and direct of women will some day, to 
your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope 
into successive lengths of personation. Alas ! 
for the man, knowing her to be at heart more 
candid than himself, who shall flounder, 
panting, through these mazesin thequest for 
truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, 
indeed, eternallysurprisingtothe other. Be- 
tween the Latin and the Teuton races there 
are similar divergences, not to be bridged 
by the most liberal sympathy. And in the 
good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of 
this life, which pass current among us as 
the wisdom of the elders, this difficulty has 
been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, 
when a young lady has angelic features, eats 
nothing to speak of, plays all day long on 
34 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

the piano, and sings ravishingly in church, 
it requires a rough infidehty, falsely called 
cynicism, to believe that she may be a little 
devil after all. Yet so it is: she may be a 
tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have 
a taste for brandy, and no heart. My com- 
pliments to George Eliot for her Rosamond 
Vincy ; the ugly work of satire she has trans- 
muted to the ends of art, by the companion 
figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much 
wanted for the education of young men. 
That dodrine of the excellence of women, 
however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as 
false, k is better to face the fad, and know, 
when you marry, that you take into your 
life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frail- 
ties; whose weak human heart beats no 
more tunefully than yours. 

But it is the objed of a liberal education 
not only to obscure the knowledge of one 
sex by another, but to magnify the natural 
differences between the two. Man is a crea- 
ture who lives not upon bread alone, but 
principally by catchwords; and the little rift 
between the sexes is astonishingly widened 
by simply teaching one set of catchwords 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

to the girls and another to the boys. To the 
first, there is shown but a very small field 
of experience, and taught a very trenchant 
principle for judgment and a6tion; to the 
other, the world of hfe is more largely dis- 
played, and their rule of conduct is propor- 
tionally widened. They are taught to follow 
different virtues, to hate different vices, to 
place their ideal, even for each other, in dif- 
ferent achievements. What should be the 
result of such a course.^ When a horse has 
run away, and the two flustered people in 
the gig have each possessed themselves of 
a rein, we know the end of that conveyance 
will be in the ditch. So, when 1 see a raw 
youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in 
a dancing measure into that most serious 
contrail, and setting out upon life's journey 
with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am 
not surprised that some make shipwreck, 
but that any come to port. What the boy 
does almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, 
the girl will shudder at as a debasing vice; 
what is to her the mere common sense of 
tactics, he will spit out of his mouth as 
shameful. Through such a sea of contrarie- 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

ties must this green couple steer their way; 
and contrive to love each other; and to re- 
spect, forsooth; and be ready, when the 
time arrives, to educate the little men and 
women who shall succeed to their places 
and perplexities. 

And yet, when all has been said, the man 
who should hold back from marriage is in 
the same case with him who runs away 
from battle. To avoid an occasion for our 
virtues is a worse degree of failure than to 
push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is 
lawful to pray God that we be not led into 
temptation; but not lawful to skulk from 
those that come to us. The noblest passage 
in one of the noblest books of this century, 
is where the old pope glories in the trial, 
nay, in the partial fall and but imperfedl 
triumph, of the younger hero.^ Without 
some such manly note, it were perhaps bet- 
ter to have no conscience at all. But there 
is a vast difference between teaching flight, 
and showing points of peril that a man may 
march the more warily. And the true con- 
clusion of this paper is to turn our back on 

* Browning's The Ring and the Book. 

37 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

apprehensions, and embrace that shining / 
and courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the 
boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good 
to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the 
grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope 
lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built 
upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny 
of circumstance and the frailty of human 
resolution. Hope looks for unquahfied suc- 
cess; but Faith counts certainly on failure, 
and takes honourable defeat to be a form of 
victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith 
grew up in Christian days, and early learnt 
humility. In the one temper, a man is in- 
dignant that he cannot spring up in a clap 
to heights of elegance and virtue; in the 
other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is 
filled with confidence because a year has 
come and gone, and he has still preserved 
some rags of honour. In the first, he expeds 
an angel for a wife ; in the last, he knows that 
she is like himself — erring, thoughtless, and 
untrue; but like himself also, filled with a 
struggling radiancy of better things, and 
adorned with ineffective qualities. You may 
safely go to school with hope; but ere you 
38 



V 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

marry, should have learned the mingled 
lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed 
with sawdust, and yet are excellent play- 
things; that hope and love address them- 
selves to a perfedion never realised, and 
yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff 
of life; that you yourself are compacted of 
infirmities, perfect, you might say, in im- 
perfedion, and yet you have a something 
in you lovable and worth preserving; and 
that, while the mass of mankind lies under 
this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce 
find one but, by some generous reading, 
will become to you a lesson, a model, and 
a noble spouse through life. So thinking, 
you will constantly support your own un- 
worthiness, and easily forgive the failings of 
your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad 
that you retain the sense of blemishes; for 
the faults of married people continually spur 
up each of them, hour by hour, to do bet- 
ter and to meet and love upon a higher 
ground. And ever, between the failures, 
there will come glimpses of kind virtues to 
encourage and console. 



39 



"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE" 
III 

ON FALLING IN LOVE 

" Lord, what fools these mortals be ! " 

^HERE is only one event in life which 




really astonishes a man and startles 
him out of his prepared opinions. 
Everything else befalls him very much as 
he expeded. Event succeeds to event, with 
an agreeable variety indeed, but with little 
that is either startling or intense; they form 
together no more than a sort of background, 
or running accompaniment to the man's own 
refledions; and he falls naturally into a cool, 
curious, and smiling habit of mind, and 
builds himself up in a conception of life 
which expefts to-morrow to be after the 
pattern of to-day and yesterday. He may be 
accustomed to the vagaries of his friends 
and acquaintances under the influence of 
love. He may sometimes look forward to 
40 



« VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

it for himself with an incomprehensible ex- 
pedation. But it is a subjed in which neither 
intuition nor the behaviour of others will 
help the philosopher to the truth. There is 
probably nothing rightly thought or rightly 
written on this matter of love that is not a 
piece of the person's experience. 1 remem- 
ber an anecdote of a well-known French 
theorist, who was debating a point eagerly 
in his cenacle. It was objeded against him 
that he had never experienced love. Where- 
upon he arose, left the society, and made it 
a point not to return to it until he considered 
that he had supplied the defed. "Now," he 
remarked, on entering, "now I am in a 
position to continue the discussion." Per- 
haps he had not penetrated very deeply into 
the subjed after all ; but the story indicates 
right thinking, and may serve as an apolo- 
gue to readers of this essay. 

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, 
it is not without something of the nature of 
dismay that the man finds himself in such 
changed conditions. He has to deal with 
commanding emotions instead of the easy 
. dislikes and preferences in which he has 

41 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

hitherto passed his days; and he recognises 
capabilities for pain and pleasure of which 
he had not yet suspeded the existence. 
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, 
the one thing of which we are tempted to 
think as supernatural, in our trite and reason- 
able world. The effedl is out of all propor- 
tion with the cause. Two persons, neither 
of them, it may be, very amiableorvery beau- 
tiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into 
each other's eyes. That has been done a 
dozen or so of times in the experience of 
either with no great result. But on this oc- 
casion all is different. They fall at once into 
that state in which another person becomes 
to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's 
creation, and demolishes our laborious theo- 
ries with a smile; in which our ideas are 
so bound up with the one master-thought 
that even the trivial cares of our own person 
become so many acts of devotion, and the 
love of life itself is translated into a wish to 
remain in the same world with so precious 
and desirable a fellow-creature. And all the 
while their acquaintances look on in stupor, 
and ask each other, with almost passionate 
42 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

emphasis, what so-and-so can see in that 
woman, or such-an-one in that man ? I am 
sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my 
part, 1 cannot think what the women mean. 
It might be very well, if the Apollo Belve- 
dere should suddenly glow all over into 
life, and step forward from the pedestal 
with that godlike air of his. But of the mis- 
begotten changelings who call themselves 
men, and prate intolerably over dinner- 
tables, I never saw one who seemed worthy 
to inspire love — no, nor read of any, ex- 
cept Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe 
in his youth. About women 1 entertain a 
somewhat different opinion; but there, I 
have the misfortune to be a man. 

There are many matters in which you 
may waylay Destiny, and bid him stand 
and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, ad- 
venturous excitement, and a great deal 
more that forms a part of this or the other 
person's spiritual bill of fare, are within the 
reach of almost any one who can dare a 
little and be patient. But it is by no means 
in the way of every one to fall in love. You 
know the difficulty Shakespeare was put in- 

43 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

to when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show 
Falstaff in love. I do not believe that Henry 
Fielding was ever in love. Scott, if it were not 
for a passage or two in Roh Roy, would give 
me very much the same effect. These are great 
names and (what is more to the purpose) 
strong, healthy, high-strung, and generous 
natures, of whom the reverse might have 
been expelled. As for the innumerable army 
of anaemic and tailorish persons who occupy 
the face of this planet with so much pro- 
priety, it is palpably absurd to imagine them 
in any such situation as a love affair. A wet 
rag goes safely by the fire; and if a man is 
blind, he cannot exped to be much im- 
pressed by romantic scenery. Apart from 
all this, many lovable people miss each 
other in the world, or meet under some un- 
favourable star. There is the nice and critical 
moment of declaration to be got over. From 
timidity or lack of opportunity a good half 
of possible love cases never get so far, and 
at least another quarter do there cease and 
determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, 
manages to prepare the way and out with 
his declaration in the nick of time. And then 
44 



" VIRGIN/BUS PUERISQ UE " 

there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on 
from snub to snub; and if he has to declare 
forty times, will continue imperturbably de- 
claring, amid the astonished consideration 
of men and angels, until he has a favourable 
answer. I daresay, if one were a woman, 
one would like to marry a man who was 
capable of doing this, but not quite one 
who had done so. It is just a little bit ab- 
je(5l, and somehow just a little bit gross; 
and marriages in which one of the parties 
has been thus battered into consent scarcely 
form agreeable subjeds for meditation. Love 
should run out to meet love with open 
arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two 
people who go into love step for step, with 
a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of 
children venturing together into a dark 
room. From the first moment when they 
see each other, with a pang of curiosity, 
through stage after stage of growing pleas- 
ure and embarrassment, they can read the 
expression of their own trouble in each 
other's eyes. There is here no declaration 
properly so called; the feeling is so plainly 
shared, that as soon as the man knows 

45 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

what it is in his own heart, he is sure of 
what it is in the woman's. 

This simple accident of falling in love is 
a.*i beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests 
vhe petrifying influence of years, disproves 
cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and 
awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the 
man had found it a good policy to disbelieve 
the existence of any enjoyment which was 
out of his reach ; and thus he turned his back 
upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and 
accustomed himself to look exclusively on 
what was common and dull. He accepted a 
prose ideal, let himself go blind of many 
sympathies by disuse ; and if he were young 
and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forewent 
these advantages. He joined himself to the 
following of what, in the old mythology of 
love, was prettily called nonchaloir; and in 
an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of self- 
resped, a preference for selfish liberty, and 
a great dash of that fear with which honest 
people regard serious interests, kept him- 
self back from the straightforward course of 
life among certain selected activities. And 
now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. 
46 



" VIRGIN/BUS PUERISQUE'' 

Paul, from his infidel affedation. His heart, 
which has been ticking accurate seconds 
for the last year, gives a bound and begins 
to beat high and irregularly in his breast. It 
seems as if he had never heard or felt or 
seen until that moment; and by the report 
of his memory, he must have lived his past 
life between sleep and waking, or with the 
preoccupied attention of a brown study. He 
is pradically incommoded by the generosity 
of his feelings, smiles much when he is 
alone, and develops a habit of looking rather 
blankly upon the moon and stars. But it is 
not at all within the province of a prose 
essayist to give a pidlure of this hyperboli- 
cal frame of mind; and the thing has been 
done already, and that to admiration. In 
Adelaide, in Tennyson's Maud, and in some 
of Heine's songs, you get the absolute ex- 
pression of this midsummer spirit. Romeo 
and Juliet were very much in love; although 
they tell me some German critics are of a 
different opinion, probably the same who 
would have us think Mercutio a dull fellow. 
Poor Antony was in love, and no mistake. 
That lay figure Marius, in Les Miserables, 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

is also a genuine case in his own way, and 
worth observation. A good many of George 
Sand's people are thoroughly in love; and 
so are a good many of George Meredith's. 
Altogether, there is plenty to read on the 
subje6t. If the root of the matter be in him, 
and if he has the requisite chords to set in 
vibration, a young man may occasionally 
enter, with the key of art, into that land of 
Beulah which is upon the borders of Heaven 
and within sight of the City of Love. There 
let him sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes 
and perilous illusions. 

One thing that accompanies the passion 
in its first blush is certainly difficult to ex- 
plain. It comes (I do not quite see how) 
that from having a very supreme sense of 
pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down 
to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breath- 
ing, in continuing to be — the lover begins 
to r^.gard his happiness as beneficial for the 
rest of the world and highly meritorious in 
himself. Our race has never been able con- 
tentedly to suppose that the noise of its 
wars, conduced by a few young gentle- 
men in a corner of an inconsiderable star, 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

does not re-echo among the courts of 
Heaven with quite a formidable efTe6l. In 
much the same taste, when people find a 
great to-do in their own breasts, they imag- 
ine it must have some influence in their 
neighbourhood. The presence of the two 
lovers is so enchanting to each other that it 
seems as if it must be the best thing possi- 
ble for everybody else. They are half in- 
clined to fancy it is because of them and 
their love that the sky is blue and the sun 
shines. And certainly the weather is usually 
fine while people are courting. ... In point 
of fad, although the happy man feels very 
kindly towards others of his own sex, there 
is apt to be something too much of the mag- 
nifico in his demeanour. If people grow 
presuming and self-important over such 
matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they 
will scarcely support the dizziest elevation 
in life without some suspicion of a strut; 
and the dizziest elevation is to love 
and be loved in return. Consequently, ac- 
cepted lovers are a trifle condescending in 
their address to other men. An overween- 
ing sense of the passion and importance of 

49 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

life hardly conduces to simplicity of man- 
ner. To women, they feel very nobly, very 
purely, and very generously, as if they were 
so many Joan-of-Arcs; but this does not 
come out in their behaviour; and they treat 
them to Grandisonian airs marked with a 
suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain 
that women do not like this sort of thing; 
but really, after having bemused myself over 
Daniel Deronda, 1 have given up trying to 
understand what they like. 

If it did nothing else, this sublime and 
ridiculous superstition, that the pleasure of 
the pair is somehow blessed to others, and 
everybody is made happier in their happi- 
ness, would serve at least to keep love gen- 
erous and great-hearted. Nor is it quite a 
baseless superstition after all. Other lovers 
are hugely interested. They strike the nicest 
balance between pity and approval, when 
they see people aping the greatness of their 
own sentiments. It is an understood thing 
in the play, that while the young gentlefolk 
are courting on the terrace, a rough flirta- 
tion is being carried on, and a light, trivial 
sort of love is growing up, between the 

50 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

footman and the singing chambermaid. As 
people are generally cast for the leading 
parts in their own imaginations, the reader 
can apply the parallel to real life without 
much chance of going wrong. In short, they 
are quite sure this other love-affair is not 
so deep-seated as their own, but they like 
dearly to see it going forward. And love, 
considered as a spedacle, must have attrac- 
tions for many who are not of the con- 
fraternity. The sentimental old maid is a 
commonplace of the novelists; and he must 
be rather a poor sort of human being, to be 
sure, who can look on at this pretty mad- 
ness without indulgence and sympathy. 
For nature commends itself to people with 
a most insinuating art; the busiest is now 
and again arrested by a great sunset; and 
you may be as pacific or as cold-blooded 
as you will, but you cannot help some emo- 
tion when you read of well-disputed battles, 
or meet a pair of lovers in the lane. 

Certainly, whatever it may be with re- 
gard to the world at large, this idea of ben- 
eficent pleasure is true as between the 
sweethearts. To do good and communicate 

51 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

is the lover's grand intention. It is the hap- 
piness of the other that makes his own most 
intense gratification. It is not possible to 
disentangle the different emotions, the pride, 
humility, pity and passion, which are ex- 
cited by a look of happy love or an unex- 
pected caress. To make one's self beautiful, 
to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do any- 
thing and all things that puff out the char- 
after and attributes and make them impos- 
ing in the eyes of others, is not only to 
magnify one's self, but to offer the most 
delicate homage at the same time. And it is 
in this latter intention that they are done by 
lovers; for the essence of love is kindness; 
and indeed it may be best defined as pas- 
sionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run 
mad and become importunate and violent. 
Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no 
longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure 
in privately displaying his weak points and 
having them, one after another, accepted 
and condoned. He wishes to be assured 
that he is not loved for this or that good 
quality, but for himself, or something as 
like himself as he can contrive to set for- 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

ward. For, although it may have been avery 
difficult thing to paint the Marriage of Cana, 
or write the fourth aft of Antony and Cleo- 
patra, there is a more difficult piece of art be- 
fore every one in this world who cares to set 
about explaininghis own charader to others. 
Words and ads are easily wrenched from 
their true significance; and they are all the 
language we have to come and go upon. A 
pitiful job we make of it, as a rule. For bet- 
ter or worse, people mistake our meaning 
and take our emotions at a wrong valua- 
tion. And generally we rest pretty content 
with our failures ; we are content to be mis- 
apprehended by cackling flirts; but when 
once a man is moonstruck with this affec- 
tion of love, he makes it a point of honour 
to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have 
the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of 
this importance; and his pride revolts at be- 
ing loved in a mistake. 

He discovers a great reludance to return 
on former periods of his life. To all that has 
not been shared with her, rights and duties, 
bygone fortunes and dispositions, he can 
look back only by a difficult and repugnant 

5^ 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

effort of the will. That he should have 
wasted some years in ignorance of what 
alone was really important, that he may have 
entertained the thought of other women 
with any show of complacency, is a burthen 
almost too heavy for his self-resped. But it 
is the thought of another past that rankles 
in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That he 
himself made a fashion of being alive in the 
bald, beggarly days before a certain meet- 
ing, is deplorable enough in all good con- 
science. But that She should have permitted 
herself the same liberty seems inconsistent 
with a Divine Providence. 

A great many people run down jealousy 
on the score that it is an artificial feeling, as 
well as pradically inconvenient. This is 
scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it 
merely attends, like an ill-humoured cour- 
tier, is itself artificial in exadly the same 
sense and to the same degree. 1 suppose 
what is meant by that objedion is that jeal- 
ousy has not always been a charader of 
man; formed no part of that very modest 
kit of sentiments with which he is supposed 
to have begun the world; but v/aited to 
54 



" VIRGINIB US P UERISQ UE'' 

make its appearance in better days and 
among richer natures. And this is equally 
true of love, and friendship, and love of 
country, and delight in what they call the 
beauties of nature, and most other things 
worth having. Love, in particular, will not 
endure any historical scrutiny: to all who 
have fallen across it, it is one of the most 
incontestible fa6ls in the world; but if you 
begin to ask what it was in other periods 
and countries, in Greece for instance, the 
strangest doubts begin to spring up, and 
everything seems so vague and changing 
that a dream is logical in comparison. Jeal- 
ousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences 
01 lOve; you may like it or not, at pleasure; 
but there it is. 

It is not exadly jealousy, however, that 
we feel when we refled on the past of those 
we love. A bundle of letters found after years 
of happy union creates no sense of insecur- 
ity in the present; and yet it will pain a 
man sharply. The two people entertain no 
vulgar doubt of each other: but this pre-ex- 
istence of both occurs to the mind as some- 
thing indelicate. To be altogether right, they 

55 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

should have had twin birth together, at the 
same moment with the feeling that unites 
them. Then indeed it would be simple and 
perfed and without reserve or afterthought. 
Then they would understand each other 
with a fulness impossible otherwise. There 
would be no barrier between them of asso- 
ciations that cannot be imparted. They 
would be led into none of those compari- 
sons that send the blood back to the heart. 
And they would know that there had been 
no time lost, and they had been together as 
much as was possible. For besides terror for 
the separation that must follow some time 
or other in the future, men feel anger and 
something like remorse, when they think 
of that other separation which endured un- 
til they met. Some one has written that love 
makes people believe in immortality, be- 
cause there seems not to be room enough 
in life for so great a tenderness, and it is in- 
conceivable that the most masterful of our 
emotions should have no more than the 
spare moments of a few years. Indeed, it 
seems strange; but if we call to mind anal- 
ogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible. 
56 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

"The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon 
us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gar- 
dens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among 
a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever 
he shoots, the game dissolves and disap- 
pears into eternity from under his falling 
arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; 
the other has but time to make one gesture 
and give one passionate cry; and they are 
all the things of a moment, ^hen the gen- j 

eration is gone, when the play is over, when 
the thirty years' panorama has been with- 
drawn in tatters from the stage of the world, 
we may ask what has become of these great, 
weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet- 
hearts who despised mortal conditions in a 
fine credulity; and they can only show us a 
few songs in a bygone taste, a few a6lions 
worth remembering, and a few children who 
have retained some happy stamp from the 
disposition of their parents. -^ f 



57 



"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE" 
IV 

TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 
MONG sayings that have a currency 




in spite of being wholly false upon 
the face of them for the sake of a 
half-truth upon another subjed which is acci- 
dentally combined with the error, one of the 
grossest and broadest conveys the mon- 
strous proposition that it is easy to tell the 
truth and hard to tell a lie. 1 wish heartily it 
were. But the truth is one; it has first to be 
discovered, then justly and exadly uttered. 
Even with instruments specially contrived 
for such a purpose — with a foot rule, a 
level, or a theodolite — it is not easy to be 
exad; it is easier, alas 1 to be inexad. From 
those who mark the divisions on a scale to 
those who measure the boundaries of em- 
pires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it 
is by careful method and minute, unweary- 
ing attention that men rise even to mate- 
■58 



" VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE " 

rial exadness or to sure knowledge even of 
external and constant things. But it is easier 
to draw the outline of a mountain than the 
changing appearance of a face; and truth in 
human relations is of this more intangible 
and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to 
communicate. Veracity to fads in a loose, 
colloquial sense — not to say that 1 have 
been in Malabar when as a matter of fad I 
was never out of England, not to say that I 
have read Cervantes in the original, when as 
a matter of fad I know not one syllable of 
Spanish — this, indeed, is easy and to the 
same degree unimportant in itself. Lies of 
this sort, according to circumstances, may 
or may not be important; in a certain sense 
even they may or may not -be false. The 
habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, 
and live truly with his wife and friends; 
while another man who never told a formal 
falsehood in his life may yet be himself one 
he — heart and face, from top to bottom. This 
IS the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. 
And, vice versa, veracity to sentiment, truth 
in a relation, truth to your own heart and 
your friends, never to feign or falsify emo- 

^9 



" VIRGIN J B US P UERISQ UE " 

tion — that is the truth which makes love 
possible and mankind happy. 

Lart de Men dire is but a drawing-room 
accomplishment unless it be pressed into 
the service of the truth. The difficulty of lit- 
erature is not to write, but to write what 
you mean; not to affed; your reader, but to 
affed him precisely as you wish. This is 
commonly understood in the case of books 
or set orations ; even in making your will, or 
writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is 
admitted by the world. But one thing you 
can never make Philistine natures under- 
stand; one thing, which yet lies on the sur- 
face, remains as unseizable to their wits as 
a high flight of metaphysics — namely, that 
the business of life is mainly carried on by 
means of this difficult art of literature, and 
according to a man's proficiency in that art 
shall be the freedom and the fulness of his 
intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is 
supposed, can say what he means; and, in 
spite of their notorious experience to the 
contrary, people so continue to suppose. 
Now, I simply open the last book I have 
been reading — Mr. Leland's captivating Eng- 
60 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

I ish Gipsies. ''It is said," I find on p. 7, "that 
those who can converse with Irish peasants 
in their own native tongue form far higher 
opinions of their appreciation of the beau- 
tiful, and of the elements of humour and pa- 
thos in their hearts, than do those who 
know their thoughts only through the me- 
dium of English. I know from my own ob- 
servations that this is quite the case with 
the Indians of North America, and it is un- 
questionably so with the gipsy." In short, 
where a man has not a full possession of the 
language, the most important, because the 
most amiable, qualities of his nature have to 
lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of 
comradeship, and the intelleftual part of 
love, rest upon these very ** elements of hu- 
mour and pathos." Here is a man opulent 
in both, and for lack of a medium he can put 
none of it out to interest in the market of 
affe6lion! But what is thus made plain to 
our apprehensions in the case of a foreign 
language is partially true even with the 
tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we 
all speak different dialeds; one shall be co- 
pious and exad:, another loose and meagre; 



" VI R GIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

but the speech of the ideal talker shall cor- 
respond and fit upon the truth of fad — not 
clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like a man- 
tle, but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's 
skin. And what is the result ? That the one 
can open himself more clearly to his friends, 
and can enjoy more of what makes life truly 
valuable — intimacy with those he loves. 
An orator makes a false step; he employs 
some trivial, some absurd, some vulgar 
phrase; in the turn of a sentence he insults, 
by a side wind, those whom he is labour- 
ing to charm; in speaking to one sentiment 
he unconsciously ruffles another in paren- 
thesis; and you are not surprised, for you 
know his task to be delicate and filled with 
perils. ''O frivolous mind of man, light ig- 
norance !" As if yourself, when you seek to 
explain some misunderstanding or excuse 
some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and 
addressing a mind still recen+ly incensed, 
were not harnessing for a more perilous ad- 
venture; as if yourself required less tad 
and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a 
suspicious lover were not more easy to offend 
than a meeting of indifferent politicians! 
62 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten 
round; the matters he discusses have been 
discussed a thousand times before ; language 
is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks 
out of a cut and dry vocabulary. But you — 
may it not be that your defence reposes on 
some subtlety of feeling, not so much as 
touched upon in Shakespeare, to express 
which, like a pioneer, you must venture 
forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, 
and become yourself a literary innovator ? 
For even in love there are unlovely humours ; 
ambiguous ads, unpardonable words, may 
yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. 
If the injured one could read your heart, 
you may be sure that he would understand 
and pardon; but, alas ! the heart cannot be 
shown — it has to be demonstrated in 
words. Do you think it is a hard thing to 
write poetry ? Why, that is to write poetry, 
and of a high, if not the highest, order. 

I should even more admire "the lifelong 
and heroic literary labours" of my fellow- 
men, patiently clearing up in words their 
loves and their contentions, and speaking 
their autobiography daily to their wives, 

6^ 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

were it not for a circumstance which less- 
ens their difficulty and my admiration by 
equal parts. For life, though largely, is not 
entirely carried on by literature. We are sub- 
je(5t to physical passions and contortions; 
the voice breaks and changes, and speaks 
by unconscious and winning inflexions ; we 
have legible countenances, like an open 
book; things that cannot be said look elo- 
quently through the eyes; and the soul, not 
locked into the body as a dungeon, dwells 
ever on the threshold with appealing sig- 
nals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, 
a flush or a paleness, are often the most 
clear reporters of the heart, and speak more 
dire<5lly to the hearts of others. The message 
flies by these interpreters in the least space 
of time, and the misunderstanding is avert- 
ed in the moment of its birth. To explain in 
words takes time and a just and patient 
hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close 
relation, patience and justice are not quali- 
ties on which we can rely. But the look or 
the gesture explains things in a breath; they 
tell their message without ambiguity; un- 
like speech, they cannot stumble by the 
64 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

way, on a reproach or an allusion that should 
steel your friend against the truth; and then 
they have a higher authority, for they are 
the dired expression of the heart, not yet 
transmitted through the unfaithful and so- 
phisticating brain. Not long ago I wrote a 
letter to a friend which came near involv- 
ing us in a quarrel; but we met, and in per- 
sonal talk 1 repeated the worst of what I had 
written, and added worse to that; and with 
the commentary of the body it seemed not 
unfriendly either to hear or say. Indeed, let- 
ters are in vain for the purposes of intimacy ; 
an absence is a dead break in the relation; 
yet two who know each other fully and are 
bent on perpetuity in love, may so preserve 
the attitude of their afTe(5lions that they may 
meet on the same terms as they had parted. 
Pitiful is the case of the blind, who can- 
not read the face ; pitiful that of the deaf, 
who cannot follow the changes of the voice. 
And there are others also to be pitied; for 
there are some of an inert, uneloquent na- 
ture, who have been denied all the symbols 
of communication, who have neither a live- 
ly play of facial expression, nor speaking 

65 



" VIRGIN/BUS PUERISQUE " 

gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the 
gift of frank, explanatory speech: people 
truly made of clay, people tied for life into 
a bag which no one can undo. They are 
poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can 
speak no language under heaven. Such peo- 
ple we must learn slowly by the tenor of 
their ads, or through yea and nay commu- 
nications; or we take them on trust on the 
strength of a general air, and now and again, 
when we see the spirit breaking through in 
a flash, corred or change our estimate. But 
these will be uphill intimacies, without 
charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom 
is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some 
minds, romantically dull, despise physical 
endowments. That is a dodrine for a mis- 
anthrope; to those who like their fellow- 
creatures it must always be meaningless; 
and, for my part, I can see few things more 
desirable, after the possession of such radi- 
cal qualities as honour and humour and pa- 
thos, than to have a lively and not a stolid 
countenance; to have looks to correspond 
with every feeling; to be elegant and de- 
lightful in person, so that we shall please 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

even in the intervals of adive pleasing, and 
may never discredit speech with uncouth 
manners or become unconsciously our own 
burlesques. But of all unfortunates there is 
one creature (for I will not call him man) 
conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who 
has forfeited his birthright of expression, 
who has cultivated artful intonations, who 
has taught his face tricks, like a pet mon- 
key, and on every side perverted or cut off 
his means of communication with his fel- 
low-men. The body is a house of many 
wmdows: there we all sit, showing our- 
selves and crying on the passers-by to come 
and love us. But this fellow has filled his 
wmdows with opaque glass, elegantly col- 
oured. His house may be admired for its 
design, the crowd may pause before the 
stamed windows, but meanwhile the poor 
proprietor must lie languishing within, un- 
comforted, unchangeably alone. 

Truth of intercourse is something more 
difficult than to refrain from open lies. It is 
possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell 
the truth. It is not enough to answer formal 
questions. To reach the truth by yea and 

67 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

nay communications implies a questioner 
with a share of inspiration, such as is often 
found in mutual love. Yea and nay mean 
nothing; the meaning must have been re- 
lated in the question. Many words are often 
necessary to convey a very simple state- 
ment; for in this sort of exercise we never 
hit the gold; the most that we can hope is 
by many arrows, more or less far off on dif- 
ferent sides, to indicate, in the course of 
time, for what target we are aiming, and after 
an hour's talk, back and forward, to convey 
the purport of a single principle or a single 
thought. And yet while the curt, pithy 
speaker misses the point entirely, a wordy, 
prolegomenous babbler will often add three 
new offences in the process of excusing 
one. It is really a most delicate affair. The 
world was made before the English lan- 
guage, and seemingly upon a different de- 
sign. Suppose we held our converse not in 
words but in music; those who have a bad 
ear would find themselves cut off from all 
near commerce, and no better than foreign- 
ers in this big world. But we do not con- 
sider how many have "a bad ear" for 

68 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

words, nor how often the most eloquent 
find nothing to reply. 1 hate questioners and 
questions; there are so few that can be 
spoken to without a lie. '' Do you forgive 
me}" Madam and sweetheart, so far as I 
have gone \\i life I have never yet been able 
to discover what forgiveness means. " Is it 
still the same between its?" Why, how can 
it be } It is eternally different; and yet you 
are still the friend of my heart. "Do you 
understand me?" God knows; I should 
think it highly improbable. 

The cruellest lies are often told in silence. 
A man may have sat in a room for hours and 
not opened his teeth, and yet come out of 
that room a disloyal friend or a vile calum- 
niator. And how many loves have perished 
because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, 
or that unmanly shame which withholds a 
man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, 
at the critical point of the relation, has but 
hung his head and held his tongue } And, 
again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth 
conveyed through a lie. Truth to feds is not 
always truth to sentiment; and part of the 
truth, as often happens in answer to a ques- 

69 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

tion, may be the foulest calumny. A fac^t may 
be an exception; but the feeling is the law, 
and it is that which you must neither gar- 
ble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conver- 
sation is a part of the meaning of each sep- 
arate statement; the beginning and the end 
define and travesty the intermediate conver- 
sation. You never speak to God; you ad- 
dress a fellow-man, full of his own tempers ; 
and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not 
to state the true fiaAs, but to convey a true 
impression; truth in spirit, not truth to let- 
ter, is the true veracity. To reconcile averted 
friends a Jesuitical discretion is often need- 
ful, not so much to gain a kind hearing as 
to communicate sober truth. Women have 
an ill name in this connexion; yet they live 
in as true relations ; the lie of a good woman 
is the true index of her heart. 

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest 
and most useful passage I remember to have 
read in any modern author, ' "two to speak 
truth — one to speak and another to hear." 
He must be very little experienced, or have 

^ A Week OYi the Concord and Merrimack Rivers^ 
Wednesday, p. 283. 
70 



" VI R GIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

no great zeal for truth, who does not recog- 
nise the fad. A grain of anger or a grain of 
suspicion produces strange acoustical ef- 
feds, and makes the ear greedy to remark 
offence. Hence we find those who have once 
quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and 
are ever ready to break the truce. To speak 
truth there must be moral equality or else no 
resped ; and hence between parent and child 
intercourse is apt to degenerate into a ver- 
bal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to 
become ingrained. And there is another side 
to this, for the parent begins with an im- 
perfect notion of the child's character, 
formed in early years or during the equi- 
nodial gales of youth; to this he adheres, 
noting only the fads which suit with his 
preconception; and wherever a person fan- 
cies himself unjustly judged, he at once and 
finally gives up the effort to speak truth. 
With our chosen friends, on the other hand, 
and still more between lovers ( for mutual 
understanding is love's essence), the truth 
is easily indicated by the one and aptly 
comprehended by the other. A hint taken, 
a look understood, conveys the gist of long 

7' 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

and delicate explanations; and where the 
life is known tv^wyea and nay become lu- 
minous. In the closest of all relations — that 
of a love well founded and equally shared 
— speech is half discarded, like a rounda- 
bout infantile process or a ceremony of for- 
mal etiquette; and the two communicate 
diredly by their presences, and with few 
looks and fewer words contrive to share 
their good and evil and uphold each other's 
hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical 
basis; it is a familiarity of nature's making 
and apart from voluntary choice. Under- 
standing has in some sort outrun knowl- 
edge, for the affection perhaps began with 
the acquaintance; and as it was not made 
like other relations, so it is not, like them, to 
be perturbed or clouded. Each knows more 
than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and 
believes by a natural compulsion; and be- 
tween man and wife the language of the body 
is largely developed and grown strangely el- 
oquent. The thought that prompted and was 
conveyed in a caress would only lose to be 
set down in words — ay, although Shake- 
speare himself should be the scribe. 
72 



" VIRGIN IB US P UERISQ UE " 

Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond 
all others, that we must strive and do bat- 
tle for the truth. Let but a doubt arise, and 
alas! all the previous intimacy and confi- 
dence is but another charge against the per- 
son doubted. " What a monstrous dishon- 
esty is this if I have been deceived so long 
and so completely !" Let but that thought 
gain entrance, and you plead before a deaf 
tribunal. Appeal to the past; why, that is 
your crime! Make all clear, convince the 
reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof 
against you. '' If yon can abuse me now, the 
more likely that you have abused me from 
the first. 

For a strong aflfedion such moments are 
worth supporting, and they will end well; 
for your advocate is in your lover's heart 
and speaks her own language; it is not you 
but she herself who can defend and clear 
you of the charge. But in slighter intima- 
cies, and for a less stringent union } Indeed, 
is it worth while } We are all incompris, only 
more or less concerned for the mischance; 
all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning 
at each other's feet like dumb, negleded 

73 



" VIRGIN IB US PUERISQ UE " 

lap-dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye — 
this is our opportunity in the ages — and 
we wag our tail with a poor smile. '' Is that 
all ? ' ' All ? If you only knew ! But how can 
they know ? They do not love us ; the more 
fools we to squander life on the indifferent. 
But the morality of the thing, you will be 
glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by 
trying to understand others that we can get 
our own hearts understood; and in matters 
of human feeling the clement judge is the 
most successful pleader. 




74 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

" You know my mother now and then argues very 
notably ; always very warmly at least. I happen often to 
differ from her; and we both think so well of our own 
arguments, that we very seldom are so happy as to con- 
vince one another. A pretty common case, I believe, in all 
vehement debatings. She says, I am too witty ; Anglice, 
too pert ; I, that she is too wise ; that is to say, being like- 
wise put into English, not so young as she has been." — 
Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, Clarissa, vol. ii. , Letter xiii. 

'HERE is a strong feeling in favour 
of cowardly and prudential pro- 
verbs. The sentiments of a man 
while he is full of ardour and hope are to be 
received, it is supposed, with some qualifi- 
cation. But when the same person has igno- 
miniously failed and begins to eat up his 
words, he should be listened to like an oracle. 
Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for 
the use of mediocre people, to discourage 
them from ambitious attempts, and gener- 
ally console them in their mediocrity. And 
since mediocre people constitute the bulk of 

75 




CRABBED AGE AND YO UTH 

humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. 
But it does not follow that the one sort of 
proposition is any less true than the other, 
or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and 
perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel 
Budgett the Successful Merchant. The one 
is dead, to be sure, while the other is still 
in his counting-house counting out his 
money; and doubtless this is a considera- 
tion. But we have, on the other hand, some 
bold and magnanimous sayings common to 
high races and natures, which set forth the 
advantage of the losing side, and proclaim 
it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. 
It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities 
reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. 
According to the latter, every lad who goes 
to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget 
your umbrella through a long life would 
seem a higher and wiser flight of achieve- 
ment than to go smiling to the stake; and 
so long as you are a bit of a coward and in- 
flexible in money matters, you fulfil the 
whole duty of man. 

It is a still more difficult consideration for 
our average men, that while all their teach- 
76 



CRABBED AGE AND YO UTH 

ers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Frank- 
lin and the ungodly Binney, have incul- 
cated the same ideal of manners, caution, 
and respedability, those characters in his- 
tory who have most notoriously flown in 
the face of such precepts are spoken of in 
hyperbolical terms of praise, and honoured 
with public monuments in the streets of 
our commercial centres. This is very be- 
wildering to the moral sense. You have Joan 
of Arc, who left a humble but honest and 
reputable livelihood under the eyes of her 
parents, to go a-colonelling, in the com- 
pany of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies 
of France; surely a melancholy example for 
one's daughters ! And then you have Col- 
umbus, who may have pioneered America, 
but, when all is said, was a most imprudent 
navigator. His life is not the kind of thing 
one would like to put into the hands of 
young people; rather, one would do one's 
utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as 
a red flag of adventure and disintegrating 
influence in life. The time would fail me if 
1 were to recite all the big names in history 
whose exploits are perfedly irrational and 

77 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

even shocking to the business mind. The 
incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it 
must engender among the mediocrities a 
very peculiar attitude towards the nobler 
and showier sides of national life. They will 
read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the 
same spirit as they assist at a performance 
of the Lyons Mail. Persons of substance take 
in the Times and sit composedly in pit or 
boxes according to the degree of their pros- 
perity in business. As for the generals who 
go galloping up and down among bomb- 
shells in absurd cocked hats — as for the 
adors who raddle their faces and demean 
themselves for hire upon the stage — they 
must belong, thank God! to a different or- 
der of beings, whom we watch as we watch 
the clouds careering in the windy, bottom- 
less inane, or read about like charaders in 
ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our off- 
spring would no more think of copying 
their behaviour, let us hope, than of doffmg 
their clothes and painting themselves blue 
in consequence of certain admissions in the 
first chapter of their school history of Eng- 
land. 

78 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

Discredited as they are in pradice, the 
cowardly proverbs hold their own in theory ; 
and it is another instance of the same spirit, 
that the opinions of old men about life have 
been accepted as final. All sorts of allow- 
ances are made for the illusions of youth; 
and none, or almost none, for the disen- 
chantments of age. It is held to be a good 
taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the 
question logically, when an old gentle- 
men waggles his head and says: "Ah, so 
I thought when 1 was your age." It is not 
thought an answer at all, if the young man 
retorts: "My venerable sir, so 1 shall most 
probably think when 1 am yours." And yet 
the one is as good as the other: pass for pass, 
tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver. 

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, 
"is but knowledge in the making." All 
opinions, properly so called, are stages on 
the road to truth. It does not follow that a 
man will travel any further; but if he has 
really considered the world and drawn a 
conclusion, he has traveled as far. This does 
not apply to formulae got by rote, which 
are stages on the road to nowhere but 

79 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

second childhood and the grave. To have a 
catchword in your mouth is not the same 
thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it 
the same thing as to have made one for 
yourself. There are too many of these catch- 
words in the world for people to rap out 
upon you like an oath and by way of an 
argument. They have a currency as intellec- 
tual counters; and many respectable per- 
sons pay their way with nothing else. They 
seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in 
the background. The imputed virtue of folios 
full of knockdown arguments is supposed 
to reside in them, just as some of the 
majesty of the British Empire dwells in the 
constable's truncheon. They are used in 
pure superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil 
Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they 
are vastly serviceable for checking unprofit- 
able discussion and stopping the mouths of 
babes and sucklings. And when a young 
man comes to a certain stage of intelleftual 
growth, the examination of these counters 
forms a gymnastic at once amusing and 
fortifying to the mind. 

Because I have reached Paris, 1 am not 
80 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

ashamed of having passed through New- 
haven and Dieppe. They were very good 
places to pass through, and I am none the 
less at my destination. All my old opinions 
were only stages on the way to the one I 
now hold, as itself is only a stage on the 
way to something else. 1 am no more abash- 
ed at having been a red-hot Socialist with 
a panacea of my own than at having been a 
sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite 
right in a million ways; but you have to be 
kicked about a little to convince you of the 
fa6l. And in the meanwhile you must do 
something, be something, believe some- 
thing. It is not possible to keep the mind 
in a state of accurate balance and blank; 
and even if you could do so, instead of 
coming ultimately to the right conclusion, 
you would be very apt to remain in a state 
of balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in 
quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthu- 
siasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the 
retrosped: if St. Paul had not been a very 
zealous Pharisee, he would have been a 
colder Christian. For my part, 1 look back 
to the time when 1 was a Socialist with 



CRABBED A GE AND YOUTH 

something like regret. I have convinced 
myself (for the moment) that we had better 
leave these great changes to what we call 
great blind forces: their blindness being so 
much more perspicacious than the little, 
peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to 
see that my own scheme would not answer; 
and all the other schemes 1 ever heard pro- 
pounded would depress some elements of 
goodness just as much as they encouraged 
others. Now 1 know that in thus turning 
Conservative with years, 1 am going through 
the normal cycle of change and travelling 
in the common orbit of men's opinions. 1 
submit to this, as 1 would submit to gout 
or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing 
age or else of failing animal heat; but I do 
not acknowledge that it is necessarily a 
change for the better — 1 daresay it is de- 
plorably for the worse. 1 have no choice in 
the business, and can no more resist this 
tendency of my mind than 1 could prevent 
my body from beginning to totter and de- 
cay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) 1 
shall doubtless outlive some troublesome 
desires; but I am in no hurry about that; 

82 



CRABBED AGE AND YO UTH 

nor, when the time comes, shall 1 plume 
myself on the immunity. Just in the same 
way, I do not greatly pride myself on 
having outlived my belief in the fairy tales 
of Socialism. Old people have faults of their 
own; they tend to become cowardly, nig- 
gardly, and suspicious. Whether from the 
growth of experience or the decline of ani- 
mal heat, I see that age leads to these and 
certain other faults; and it follows, of 
course, that while in one sense I hope I am 
journeying towards the truth, in another 1 
am indubitably posting towards these forms 
and sources of error. 

As we go catching and catching at this or 
that corner of knowledge, now getting a fore- 
sight of generous possibilities, now chilled 
with a glimpse of prudence, we may com- 
pare the headlong course of our years to a 
swift torrent in which a man is carried 
away; now he is dashed against a boulder, 
now he grapples for a moment to a trailing 
spray; at the end, he is hurled out and over- 
whelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. 
We have no more than glimpses and touches ; 
we are torn away from our theories ; we are 

83 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

spun round and round and shown this or 
the other view of Hfe, until only fools or 
knaves can hold to their opinions. We take 
a sight at a condition in life, and say we 
have studied it; our most elaborate view is 
no more than an impression. If we had 
breathing space, we should take the occa- 
sion to modify and adjust; but at this break- 
neck hurry, we are no sooner boys than we 
are adult, no sooner in love than married or 
jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to 
be another, and no sooner in the fulness of 
our manhood than we begin to decline to- 
wards the grave. It is in vain to seek for 
consistency or expert clear and stable views 
in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. 
This is no cabinet science, in which things 
are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a 
pistol to our head; we are confronted with 
a new set of conditions on which we have 
not only to pass a judgment, but to take 
action, before the hour is at an end. And we 
cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; 
in this flux of things, our identity itself seems 
in a perpetual variation ; and not infrequently 
we find our own disguise the strangest in 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

the masquerade. In the course of time, we 
grow to love things we hated and hate things 
we loved. Milton is not so dull as he once 
was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing. 
It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not 
nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use 
pretending; even the thrice royal game of 
hide and seek has somehow lost in zest. All 
our attributes are modified or changed; and 
it will be a poor account of us if our views 
do not modify and change in a proportion. 
To hold the same views at forty as we held 
at twenty is to have been stupefied for a 
score of years, and take rank, not as a 
prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well 
birched and none the wiser. It is as if a 
ship captain should sail to India from the 
Port of London ; and having brought a chart 
of the Thames on deck at his first setting 
out, should obstinately use no other for the 
whole voyage. 

And mark you, it would be no less fool- 
ish to begin at Gravesend with a chart of 
the Red Sea. Si Jeiinesse savait, si Vieillesse 
pouvait, is a very pretty sentiment, but not 
necessarily right. In five cases out of ten, 

8=5 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

it is not so much that the young people 
do not know, as that they do not choose. 
There is something irreverent in the specu- 
lation, but perhaps the want of power has 
more to do with the wise resolutions of age 
than we are always willing to admit. It 
would be an instrudive experiment to make 
an old man young again and leave him all 
his savoir. 1 scarcely think he would put 
his money in the Savings Bank after all; I 
doubt if he would be such an admirable son 
as we are led to expeft; and as for his con- 
dud in love, 1 believe firmly he would out- 
Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new 
compeerstotheblush. Prudence isawooden 
Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Frank- 
lin walks with the portly air of a high priest, 
and after whom dances many a successful 
merchant in the charader of Atys. But it is 
not a deity to cultivate in youth. If a man 
hves to any considerable age, it cannot be 
denied that he laments his imprudences, but 
I notice he often laments his youth a deal 
more bitterly and with a more genuine in- 
tonation. 

It is customary to say that age should be 
Q6 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

considered, because it comes last. It seems 
just as much to the point, that youth comes 
first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if 
you go on to add that age, in a majority of 
cases, never comes at all. Disease and acci- 
dent make short work of even the most 
prosperous persons; death costs nothing, 
and the expense of a headstone is an incon- 
siderable trifle to the happy heir. To be 
suddenly snuffed out in the middle of am- 
bitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; 
but when a man has been grudging himself 
his own Hfe in the meanwhile, and saving 
up everything for the festival that was never 
to be, it becomes that hysterically moving 
sort of tragedy which hes on the confines of 
farce. The vidim is dead — and he has cun- 
ningly overreached himself: a combination 
of calamities none the less absurd for being 
grim. To husband a favourite claret until the 
batch turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke 
of policy ; and how much more with a whole 
cellar — a whole bodily existence ! People 
may lay down their lives with cheerfulness 
in the sure expectation of a blessed immor- 
tality ; but that is a different affair from giv- 

87 



CRABBED AGE AND YO UTH 

ing up youth with all its admirable pleasures, 
in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a 
more than problematical, nay, more than 
improbable, old age. We should not com- 
pliment a hungry man, who should refuse a 
whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for 
the dessert, before he knew whether there 
was to be any dessert or not. If there be such 
a thing as imprudence in the world, we 
surely have it here. We sail in leaky bot- 
toms and on great and perilous waters; and 
to take a cue from the dolorous old naval bal- 
lad, we have heard the mermaidens sing- 
ing, and know that we shall never see dry 
land any more. Old and young, we are all 
on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco 
among the crew, for God's sake pass it 
round, and let us have a pipe before we go ! 
Indeed, by the report of our elders, this 
nervous preparation for old age is only 
trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, 
and after all it is a friend who comes to 
meet us. After the sun is down and the 
west faded, the heavens begin to fill with 
shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of 
equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

the violent ups and downs of passion and 
disgust; the same influence that restrains 
our hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the 
pleasures are less intense, the troubles are 
milder and more tolerable; and in a word, 
this period for which we are asked to hoard 
up everything as for a time of famine, is, in 
its own right, the richest, easiest, and hap- 
piest of life. Nay, by managing its own 
work and following its own happy inspira- 
tion, youth is doing the best it can to en- 
dow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth 
is your only prelude to a self-contained and 
independent age; and the muff inevitably 
develops into the bore. There are not many 
Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon their 
first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we 
wish to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' 
kitchen in the East End, to go down in a 
diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be 
about it while we are still young. It will not 
do to delay until we are clogged with pru- 
dence and limping with rheumatism, and 
people begin to ask us: ''What does Grav- 
ity out of bed .?" Youth is the time to go 
flashing from one end of the world to 

89 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

the other both in mind and body; to try the 
manners of different nations; to hear the 
chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town 
and country; to be converted at a revival; 
to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write 
halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and 
wait all day long in the theatre to applaud 
Hernani. There is some meaning in the old 
theory about wild oats; and a man who has 
not had his green-sickness and got done 
with it for good, is as little to be depended 
on as an unvaccinated infant. ''It is extra- 
ordinary," said Lord Beaconsfield, one of 
the brightest and best preserved of youths 
up to the date of his last novel,' "it is ex- 
traordinary how hourly and how violently 
change the feelings of an inexperienced 
young man." And this mobility is a special 
talent entrusted to his care; a sort of inde- 
structible virginity; a magic armor, with 
which he can pass unhurt through great 
dangers and come unbedaubed out of the 
miriest passages. Let him voyage, speculate, 
see all that he can, do all that he may ; his soul 
has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all 

* Lothair. 
90 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

weathers, and never be a halfpenny the 
worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, 
with anything like a i-m chance, were prob- 
ably little worth saving from the first; they 
must have been feeble fellows — creatures 
made of putty and pack-thread, without 
steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in 
their composition ; we may sympathise with 
their parents, but there is not much cause 
to go into mourning for themselves; for to 
be quite honest, the weak brother is the 
worst of mankind. 

When the old man waggles his head and 
says, *' Ah, so 1 thought when 1 was your 
age," he has proved the youth's case. 
Doubtless, whether from growth of expe- 
rience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so 
no longer; but he thought so while he was 
young; and all men have thought so while 
they were young, since there was dew in 
the morning or hawthorn in May; and here 
is another young man adding his vote to 
those of previous generations and rivetting 
another link to the chain of testimony. It is 
as natural and as right for a young man to 
be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in 

91 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

swoops and circles, and beat about his cage 
like any other wild thing newly captured, 
as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers 
to love their offspring, or heroes to die for 
something worthier than their lives. 

By way of an apologue for the aged, 
when they feel more than usually tempted 
to offer their advice, let me recommend the 
following little tale. A child who had been 
remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of 
lead soldiers) found himself growing to the 
level of acknowledged boyhood without any 
abatement of his childish taste. He was thir- 
teen; already he had been taunted for dal- 
lying overlong about the playbox; he had 
to blush if he was found among his lead 
soldiers; the shades of the prison-house 
were closing about him with a vengeance. 
There is nothing more difficult than to put 
the thoughts of children into the language 
of their elders; but this is the effed of his 
meditations at this jundure: " Plainly," he 
said, '' 1 must give up my playthings, in the 
meanwhile, since 1 am not in a position to se- 
cure myself against idle jeers. At the same 
time, 1 am sure that playthings are the very 
92 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

pick of life; all people give them up out of 
the same pusillanimous resped for those 
who are a little older; and if they do not re- 
turn to them as soon as they can, it is only 
because they grow stupid and forget. I 
shall be wiser; 1 shall conform for a little to 
the ways of their foolish world ; but so soon 
as 1 have made enough money, 1 shall retire 
and shut myself up among my playthings 
until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing 
in the train along the Esterel mountains be- 
tween Cannes and Frejus, he remarked a 
pretty house in an orange garden at the angle 
of a bay, and decided that this should be his 
Happy Valley. Astrea Redux ; childhood was 
to come again ! The idea has an air of sim- 
ple nobility to me, not unworthy of Cincin- 
natus. And yet, as the reader has probably 
anticipated, it is never likely to be carried into 
effed. There was a worm i' the bud, a fatal 
error in the premises. Childhood must pass 
away, and then youth, as surely as age ap- 
proaches. The true wisdom is to be always 
seasonable, and to change with a good grace 
in changing circumstances. To love play- 
things well as a child, to lead an adventurous 

91> 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

and honourable youth, and to settle when 
the time arrives, into a green and smiling 
age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve 
well of yourself and your neighbour. 

You need repent none of your youthful 
vagaries. They may have been over the score 
on one side, just as those of age are proba- 
bly over the score on the other. But they 
had a point; they not only befitted your 
age and expressed its attitude and passions^ 
but they had a relation to what was out- 
side of you, and implied criticisms on the 
existing state of things, which you need not 
allow to have been undeserved, because you 
now see that they were partial. All error, 
not merely verbal, is a strong way of stat- 
ing that the current truth is incomplete. The 
follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, 
just as much as the embarrassing questions 
put by babes and sucklings. Their most anti- 
social a6ls indicate the defeds of our society. 
When the torrent sweeps the man against 
a boulder, you must expe6l him to scream, 
and you need not be surprised if the scream 
is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at 
the Church of England, discovered the cure 
94 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

of all evils in universal atheism. Generous 
lads irritated at the injustices of society, 
see nothing for it but the abolishment of 
everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. 
Shelley was a young fool; so are these cock- 
sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to 
be a fool than to be dead. It is better to 
emit a scream in the shape of a theory than 
to be entirely insensible to the jars and in- 
congruities of life and take everything as it 
comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people 
swallow the universe like a pill; they travel 
on throu2:h the world, like smiling images 
pushed from behind. For God's sake give 
me the young man who has brains enough 
to make a fool of himself! As for the others, 
the irony of fads shall take it out of their 
hands, and make fools of them in down- 
right earnest, ere the farce be over. There 
shall be such a mopping and a mowing at 
the last day, and such blushing and con- 
fusion of countenance for all those who have 
been wise in their own esteem, and have 
not learnt the rough lessons that youth 
hands on to age. If we are indeed here to 
perfect and complete our own natures, and 

95 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

grow larger, stronger, and more sympathe- 
tic against some nobler career in the future, 
we had all best bestir ourselves to the ut- 
most while we have the time. To equip a 
dull, respeftable person with wings would 
be but to make a parody of an angel. 

In short, if youth is not quite right in its 
opinions, there is a strong probability that 
age is not much more so. Undying hope is 
co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible 
credulity. A man finds he has been wrong 
at every preceding stage of his career, only 
to deduce the astonishing conclusion that 
he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after 
centuries of f^dlure, are still upon the eve 
of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. 
Since we have explored the maze so long 
without result, it follows, for poor human 
reason, that we cannot have to explore much 
longer; close by must be the centre, with a 
champagne luncheon and a piece of orna- 
mental water. How if there were no centre 
at all, but just one alley after another, and 
the whole world a labyrinth without end or 
issue ? 

I overheard the other day a scrap of con- 
96 



CRABBED A GE AND YO UTH 

versation, which I take the liberty to repro- 
duce. ''What 1 advance is true," said one. 
**But not the whole truth," answered the 
other. ' 'Sir, " returned the first (and it seemed 
to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson 
in the speech), "Sir, there is no such thing 
as whole truth!" Indeed, there is nothing 
so evident in life as that there are two sides 
to a question. History is one long illustra- 
tion. The forces of nature are engaged, day 
by day, in cudgelling it into our backward 
intelligences. We never pause for a mo- 
ment's consideration, but we admit it as an 
axiom. An enthusiast sways humanity ex- 
adly by disregarding this great truth, and 
dinning it into our ears that this or that ques- 
tion has only one possible solution; and 
your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, domi- 
nates things for a while and shakes the 
world out of a doze; but when once he is 
gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential peo- 
ple set to work to remind us of the other 
side and demolish the generous imposture. 
While Calvin is putting everybody exadly 
right in his Institutes, and hot-headed Knox 
is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is al- 

9.7 



CRABBED AGE AND YO UTH 

ready looking at the other side in his library 
in Perigord, and predicting that they will 
find as much to quarrel about in the Bible 
as they had found already in the Church. 
Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth 
has the other. There is nothing more certain 
than that both are right, except perhaps that 
both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; 
for who knows but what agreeing to differ 
may not be a form of agreement rather than 
a form of difference ? 

1 suppose it is written that any one who 
sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must con- 
tradid himself to his very face. For here 
have 1 fairly talked myself into thinking that 
we have the whole thing before us at last; 
that there is no answer to the mystery, ex- 
cept that there are as many as you please, 
that there is no centre to the maze because, 
like the famous sphere, its centre is every- 
where ; and that agreeing to differ with every 
ceremony of politeness, is the only ''one 
undisturbed song of pure consent" to which 
we are ever likely to lend our musical voices. 



98 




AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

" Boswell: We grow weary when idle." 
"Johnson : That is, sir, because others being busy, we 
want company; but if we were idle, there would be no 
growing weary ; we should all entertain one another. " 

UST now, when every one is bound, 
under pain of a decree in absence 
conviding them of /^5^-respeda- 
bility, to enter on some lucrative profession, 
and labour therein with something not far 
short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite 
party who are content when they have 
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the 
meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and 
gasconade. And yet this should not be. 
Idleness so called, which does not consist 
in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal 
not recognised in the dogmatic formularies 
of the ruhng class, has as good a right to 
state its position as industry itself. It is ad- 
mitted that the presence of people who re- 
fuse to enter in the great handicap race for 

99 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a 
disenchantment for those who do. A fine 
fellow (as we see so many) takes his deter- 
mination, votes for the sixpences, and in the 
emphatic Americanism, ''goes for" them. 
And while such an one is ploughing dis- 
tressfully up the road, it is not hard to under- 
stand his resentment, when he perceives 
cool persons in the meadows by the way- 
side, lying with a handkerchief over their 
ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander 
is touched in a very delicate place by the 
disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory 
of having taken Rome for these tumultuous 
barbarians, who poured into the Senate 
house, and found the Fathers sitting silent 
and unmoved by their success ? It is a sore 
thing to have laboured along and scaled the 
arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find 
humanity indifferent to your achievement. 
Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; 
financiers have only a superficial toleration 
for those who know little of stocks ; literary 
persons despise the unlettered; and people 
of all pursuits combine to disparage those 
who have none. 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

But though this is one difficulty of the 
subject, it is not the greatest. You could not 
be put in prison for speaking against indus- 
try, but you can be sent to Coventry for 
speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty 
with most subjects is to do them well; there- 
fore, please to remember this is an apology. 
It is certain that much may be judiciously 
argued in favour of diligence; only there is 
something to be said against it, and that is 
what, on the present occasion, 1 have to say. 
To state one argument isnotnecessarilyto be 
deaf to all others, and that a man has written 
a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason 
why he shouldneverhavebeento Richmond. 

It is surely beyond a doubt that people 
should be a good deal idle in youth. For 
though here and there a Lord Macaulay may 
escape from school honours with all his wits 
about him, most boys pay so dear for their 
medals that they never afterwards have a 
shot in their locker, and begin the world 
bankrupt. And the same holds true during 
all the time a lad is educating himself, or 
suffering others to educate him. It must have 
been a very foolish old gentleman who ad- 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

dressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: 
' ' Young man, ply your book diligently now, 
and acquire a stock of knowledge ; for when 
years come upon you, you will find that 
poring upon books will be but an irksome 
task. " The old gentleman seems to have been 
unaware that many other thingsbesides read- 
ing grow irksome, and not a few become 
impossible, by the time a man has to use 
speftacles and cannot walk without a stick. 
Books are good enough in their own way, 
but they are a mighty bloodless substitute 
for life. It seems a pity to sit, Hke the Lady 
of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your 
back turned on all the bustle and glamour of 
reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the 
old anecdote reminds us, he will have little 
time for thought. 

If you look back on your own education, 
I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, in- 
strudive hours of truantry that you regret; 
you would rather cancel some lack-lustre 
periods between sleep and waking in the 
class. For my own part 1 have attended a 
good many ledures in my time. I still re- 
member that the spinning of a top is a case 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that 
Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide 
a crime. But though I would not willingly 
part with such scraps of science, I do not 
set the same store by them as by certain 
other odds and ends that I came by in the 
open street while 1 was playing truant. This 
is not the moment to dilate on that mighty 
place of education, which was the favourite 
school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns 
out yearly many inglorious masters in the 
Science of the Aspeds of Life. Suffice it to 
say this : if a lad does not learn in the streets, 
it is because he has no faculty of learning. 
Nor is the truant always in the streets, for 
if he prefers, he may go out by the gar- 
denedsuburbsintothecountry.He may pitch 
on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke 
innumerable pipes to the tune of the water 
on the stones. A bird will sing in thethicket. 
And there he may fall into a vein of kindly 
thought, and see things in a new perspec- 
tive. Why, if this be not education, what is } 
We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman 
accosting such an one, and the conversa- 
tion that should thereupon ensue: — 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

"How now, young fellow, what dost 
thou here ?" 

"Truly, sir, 1 take mine ease." 

"Is not this the hour of the class? and 
should'st thou not be plying thy Book with 
diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain 
knowledge ?" 

"Nay, but thus also 1 follow after Learn- 
ing, by your leave." 

"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, 
I pray thee ? Is it mathematics .?" 

"No, to be sure." 

"Is it metaphysics?" 

"Nor that." 

" Is it some language ?" 

"Nay, it is no language." 

" Is it a trade ?" 

"Nor a trade neither." 

"Why, then, what is't .?" 

"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come 
for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous 
to note what is commonly done by persons 
in my case, and where are the ugliest 
Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, 
what manner of Staff is of the best service. 
Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn 
104 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

by root-of-heart a lesson which my master 
teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment." 

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was 
much commoved with passion, and shaking 
his cane with a very threatful countenance, 
broke forth upon this wise: ''Learning, 
quotha!" said he; *M would have all such 
rogues scourged by the Hangman!" 

And so he would go his way, ruffling out 
his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a tur- 
key when it spread its feathers. 

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the com- 
mon opinion. A fad is not called a fad, but 
a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one 
of your scholastic categories. An inquiry 
must be in some acknowledged diredion, 
with a name to go by; or else you are not 
inquiring at all, only lounging; and the 
workhouse is too good for you. It is sup- 
posed that all knowledge is at the bottom 
of a well, or the far end of a telescope. 
Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to re- 
gard all experience as a single great book, in 
which to study for a few years ere we go 
hence ; and it seemed all one to him whether 
you should read in Chapter xx., which is the 

105 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., 
which is hearing the band play in the gar- 
dens. As a matter of fad, an intelligent per- 
son, looking out of his eyes and hearkening 
in his ears, with a smile on his face all the 
time, will get more true education than many 
another in a life of heroic vigils. There is 
certainly some chill and arid knowledge to 
be found upon the summits of formal and la- 
borious science; but it is all round about 
you, and for the trouble of looking, that you 
will acquire the warm and palpitating fads 
of life. While others are filling their memory 
with a lumber of words, one-half of which 
they will forget before the week be out, your 
truant may learn some really useful art; to 
play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to 
speak with ease and opportunity to all vari- 
eties of men. Many who have "plied their 
book diligently," and know all about some 
one branch or another of accepted lore, come 
out of the study with an ancient and owl- 
likedemeanour,and prove dry, stockish, and 
dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts 
of life. Many make a large fortune, who re- 
main underbred and pathetically stupid to 
1 06 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

the last. And meantime there goes the idler, 
who began life along with them — by your 
leave, a different pidure. He has had time to 
take care of his health and his spirits ; he has 
been a great deal in the open air, which is 
the most salutary of all things for both body 
and mind ; and if he has never read the great 
Book in very recondite places, he has dipped 
into it and skimmed it over to excellent pur- 
pose. Might not the student afford some 
Hebrew roots, and the business man some 
of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's 
knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? 
Nay, and the idler has another and more 
important quality than these. 1 mean his 
wisdom. He who has much looked on at 
the childish satisfaction of other people in 
their hobbies, will regard his own with only 
a very ironical indulgence. He will not be 
heard among the dogmatists. He will have 
a great and cool allowance for all sorts of 
people and opinions. If he finds no out-of- 
the-way truths, he will identify himself with 
no very burning falsehood. His way takes 
him along a by-road, not much frequented, 
but very even and pleasant, which is called 

107 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

Commonplace Lane, ajid leads to the Belve- 
dere of Commonsense. Thence he shall com- 
mand an agreeable, if no very noble pros- 
pad; and while others behold the East and 
West, the Devi' and the Sunrise, he will be 
contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour 
upon all sublunary things, with an army of 
shadows running speedily and in many dif- 
ferent diredions into the great daylight of 
Eternity. The shadows and the generations, 
the shrill dodors and the plangent wars, go 
by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but 
underneath all this, a man may see, out of 
the Belvedere windows, much green and 
peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; 
good people laughing, drinking, and mak- 
ing love as they did before the Flood or the 
French Revolution; and the old shepherd 
telling his tale under the hawthorn. 

Extreme busyness, whether at school or 
college, kirk or market, is a symptom of de- 
ficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness 
implies a catholic appetite and a strong 
sense of personal identity. There is a sort of 
dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who 
are scarcely conscious of living except in 
108 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

the exercise of some conventional occupa- 
tion. Bring these fellows into the country, 
or set them aboard ship, and you will see 
how they pine for their desk or their study. 
They have no curiosity; they cannot give 
themselves over to random provocations; 
they do not take pleasure in the exercise of 
their faculties for its own sake; and unless 
Necessity lays about them with a stick, they 
v/ill even stand still. It is no good speaking 
to such folk: they cannot be idle, their na- 
ture is not generous enough; and they pass 
those hours in a sort of coma, which are not 
dedicated to furious moiling in the gold- 
mill. When they do not require to go to the 
office, when they are not hungry and have no 
mind to drink, the whole breathing world 
is a blank to them. If they have to wait an 
hour or so for a train, they M into a stupid 
trance with their eyes open. To see them, 
you would suppose there was nothing to 
look at and no one to speak with; you 
would imagine they were paralysed or alien- 
ated; and yet very possibly they are hard 
workers in their own way, and have good 
eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the 

109 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

market. They have been to school and col- 
lege, but all the time they had their eye on 
the medal; they have gone about in the 
world and mixed with clever people, but all 
the time they were thinking of their own 
affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small 
to begin with, they have dwarfed and nar- 
rowed theirs by a life of all work and no 
play ; until here they are at forty, with a list- 
less attention, a mind vacant of all material 
of amusement, and not one thought to rub 
against another, while they wait for the 
train. Before he was breeched, he might 
have clambered on the boxes; when he was 
twenty, he would have stared at the girls; 
but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff- 
box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt up- 
right upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. 
This does not appear to me as being Success 
in Life. 

But it is not only the person himself who 
suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and 
children, his friends and relations, and down 
to the very people he sits with in a railway 
carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion 
to what a man calls his business, is only to be 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

sustained by perpetual negled of many other 
things. And it is not by any means certain 
that a man's business is the most important 
thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate 
it will seem clear that many of the wisest, 
most virtuous, and most beneficent parts 
that are to be played upon the Theatre of 
Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and 
pass, among the world at large, as phases 
of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the 
walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, 
and diligent fiddlers in the orchestra, but 
those who look on and clap their hands 
from the benches, do really play a part and 
fulfil important offices towards the general 
result^ You are no doubt very dependent on 
the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of 
the guards and signalmen who convey you 
rapidly from place to place, and the police- 
men who walk the streets for your protec- 
tion; but is there not a thought of gratitude 
in your heart for certain other benefadors 
who set you smiling when they fall in your 
way, or season your dinner with good com- 
pany ? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his 
friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were 
better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. 
And though Falstaff was neither sober nor 
very honest, 1 think I could name one or 
two long-faced Barabbases whom the world 
could better have done without. Hazlitt 
mentions that he was more sensible of obli- 
gation to Northcote, who had never done 
him anything he could call a service, than to 
his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for 
he thought a good companion emphatically 
the greatest benefador. 1 know there are 
people in the world who cannot feel grate- 
ful unless the favour has been done them at 
the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a 
churlish disposition. A man may send you 
six sheets of letter-paper covered with the 
most entertaining gossip, or you may pass 
half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, 
over an article of his; do you think the ser- 
vice would be greater, if he had made the 
manuscript in his heart's blood, like a com- 
pa6l with the devil ? Do you really fancy you 
should be more beholden to your corres- 
pondent, if he had been damning you all the 
while for your importunity ? Pleasures are 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

more beneficial than duties because, like the 
quality of mercy, they are not strained, and 
they are twice blest. There must always be 
two to a kiss, and there may be a score in 
a jest; but wherever there is an element of 
sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, 
and, among generous people, received with 
confusion. There is no duty we so much un- 
derrate as the duty of being happy. By being 
happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon 
the world, which remain unknown even to 
ourselves, or when they are disclosed, sur- 
prise nobody so much as the benefa6lor. 
The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran 
down the street after a marble, with so jolly 
an air that he set every one he passed into 
a good humour; one of these persons, who 
had been delivered from more than usually 
black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and 
gave him some money with this remark: 
**You see what sometimes comes of look- 
ing pleased." If he had looked pleased before, 
.he had now to look both pleased and mys- 
tified. For my part, I justify this encourage- 
ment of smiling rather than tearful children ; 
I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but 

113 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal 
largely in the opposite commodity. A happy 
man or woman is a better thing to find than 
a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating 
focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a 
room is as though another candle had been 
lighted. We need not care whether they could 
prove the forty-seventh proposition ; they do 
a better thing than that, they pradically 
demonstrate the great Theorem of the Live- 
ableness of Life. Consequently, if a person 
cannot be happy without remaining idle, 
idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary 
precept ; but thanks to hunger and the work- 
house, one not easily to be abused; and 
within practical limits, it is one of the most 
incontestable truths in the whole Body of 
Morality. Look at one of your industrious 
fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He 
sows hurry and reaps indigestion ; he puts a 
vast deal of adivity out to interest, and re- 
ceives a large measure of nervous derange- 
ment in return. Either he absents himiself 
entirely from all fellowship, and lives a re- 
cluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a 
leaden inkpot; or he comes among people 
114 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

swiftly and bitterly, in a contradion of his 
whole nervous system, to discharge some 
temper before he returns to work. I do not 
care how much or how well he works, this 
fellow is an evil feature in other people's 
lives. They would be happier if he were 
dead. They could easier do without his ser- 
vices in the Circumlocution Office, than they 
can tolerate his fradious spirits. He poisons 
life at the well-head. It is better to be beg- 
gared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, 
than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle. 

And what in God's name, is all this pother 
about ? For what cause do they embitter 
their own and other people's lives ? That a 
man should publish three or thirty articles 
a year, that he should finish or not finish 
his great allegorical pidure, are questions of 
little interest to the world. The ranks of life 
are full; and although a thousand fall, there 
are always some to go into the breach. 
When they told Joan of Arc she should be 
at home minding women's work, she an- 
swered there were plenty to spin and wash. 
And so, even with your own rare gifts! 
When nature is *'so careless of the single 

••5 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

life," why should we coddle ourselves into 
the fancy that our own is of exceptional im- 
portance ? Suppose Shakespeare had been 
knocked on the head some dark night in Sir 
Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would 
have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher 
gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and 
the student to his book; and no one been 
any the wiser of the loss. There are not many 
works extant, if you look the alternative all 
over, which are worth the price of a pound 
of tobacco to a man of limited means. This 
is a sobering refledion for the proudest of 
our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, 
upon consideration, find no great cause for 
personal vainglory in the phrase; for al- 
though tobacco is an admirable sedative, 
the qualities necessary for retailing it are 
neither rare nor precious in themselves. 
Alas and alas! you may take it how you 
will, but the services of no single individ- 
ual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gen- 
tleman with a protraded nightmare! And 
yet you see merchants who go and labour 
themselves into a great fortune and hence 
into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who 
116 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

keep scribbling at little articles until their 
temper is a cross to all who come about 
them, as though Pharaoh should set the Is- 
raelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; 
and fine young men who work themselves 
into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse 
with white plumes upon it. Would you not 
suppose these persons had been whispered, 
by the Master of the Ceremonies, the prom- 
ise of some momentous destiny ? and that 
this lukewarm bullet on which they play 
their fiirces was the bull's-eye and centre- 
point of all the universe ? And yet it is not 
so. The ends for which they give away 
their priceless youth, for all they know, may 
be chimerical or hurtful ; the glory and riches 
they expe6l may never come, or may find 
them indifferent; and they and the world 
they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the 
mind freezes at the thought. 



117 



ORDERED SOUTH 



/3 ©S^ ^ curious irony of fate, the places 
^ ^^to which we are sent when health 
•^^5^ deserts us are often singularly beau- 
tiful. Often^ too, they are places we have 
visited in former years, or seen briefly in 
passing by, and kept ever afterwards in 
pious memory; and we please ourselves 
with the fancy that we shall repeat many 
vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take 
up again the thread of our enjoyment in the 
same spirit as we let it fall. We shall now 
have an opportunity of finishing many 
pleasant excursions, interrupted of yore be- 
fore our curiosity was fully satisfied. It may 
be that we have kept in mind, during all 
these years, the recollection of some valley 
into which we have just looked down for a 
moment before we lost sight of it in the dis- 
order of the hills ; it may be that we have lain 
awake at night, and agreeably tantalised 
ourselves with the thought of corners we 



ORDERED SOUTH 

had never turned, or summits we had all 
but climbed: we shall now be able, as we 
tell ourselves, to complete all these unfinish- 
ed pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers 
that confined our recolledions. 

The promise is so great, and we are all so 
easily led away when hope and memory are 
both in one story, that 1 daresay the sick 
man is not very inconsolable when he re- 
ceives sentence of banishment, and is in- 
chned to regard his ill-health as not the least 
fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he im- 
mediately undeceived. The stir and speed 
of the journey, and the restlessness that 
goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep 
between two days of noisy progress, fever 
him, and stimulate his dull nerves into some- 
thing of their old quickness and sensibility. 
And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal 
splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill 
and plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one 
wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the 
first great winds of winter will transmute, 
as in the fable, into withered leaves. And 
so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity 
and simplicity of such little glimpses of 

119 



ORDERED SOUTH 

country and country ways as flash upon him 
through the windows of the train; httle 
glimpses that have a charader all their own ; 
sights seen as a travelling swallow might 
see them from the wing, or Iris as she went 
abroad over the land on some Olympian 
errand. Here and there, indeed, a few chil- 
dren huzzah and wave their hands to the 
express; but for the most part, it is an in- 
terruption too brief and isolated to attradl 
much notice; the sheep do not cease from 
browsing; a girl sits balanced on the pro- 
jeding tiller of a canal boat, so precariously 
that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a 
leaping fish would be enough to overthrow 
the dainty equilibrium, and yet all these 
hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron 
have been precipitated roaring past her very 
ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor, 
not a turn of the averted head, to indicate 
that she has been even conscious of its 
passage. Herein, 1 think, lies the chief at- 
tradion of railway travel. The speed is so 
easy, and the train disturbs so little the 
scenes through which it takes us, that our 
heart becomes full of the placidity and still- 

120 



ORDERED SOUTH 

ness of the country; and while the body is 
borne forward in the flying chain of car- 
riages, the thoughts alight, as the humour 
moves them, at unfrequented stations; they 
make haste up the poplar alley that leads 
toward the town; they are left behind with 
the signalman as, shading his eyes with his 
hand, he watches the long train sweep away 
into the golden distance. 

Moreover, there is still before the invalid 
the shock of wonder and delight with which 
he will learn that he has passed the indefin- 
able line that separates South from North. 
And this is an uncertain moment; for some- 
times the consciousness is forced upon him 
early, on the occasion of some slight asso- 
ciation, a colour, a fiower, or a scent; and 
sometimes not until, one fine morning, he 
wakes up with the southern sunshine peep- 
ing through the persiennes, and the south- 
ern patois confusedly audible belowthe win- 
dows. Whether it come early or late, how- 
ever, this pleasure will not end with the 
anticipation, as do so many others of the 
same family. It will leave him wider awake 
than it found him, and give a new signifi- 



ORDERED SOUTH 

cance to all he may see for many days to 
come. There is something in the mere name 
of the South that carries enthusiasm along 
with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks 
up his ears ; he becomes as anxious to seek out 
beauties and to get by heart the permanent 
lines and character of the landscape, as if he 
had been told that it was all his own — an 
estate out of which he had been kept un- 
justly, and which he was now to receive in 
free and full possession. Even those who 
have never been there before feel as if they 
had been; and everybody goes comparing, 
and seeking for the familiar, and finding it 
with such ecstasies of recognition, that one 
would think they were coming home after 
a weary absence, instead of travelling hour- 
ly farther abroad. 

It is only after he is fairly arrived and set- 
tled down in his chosen corner, that the in- 
valid begins to understand the change that 
has befallen him. Everything about him is 
as he had remembered, or as he had antici- 
pated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are 
the olive gardens and the blue sea. Nothing 
can change the eternal magnificence of form 



ORDERED SO UTH 

of the naked Alps behind Mentone ; nothing, 
not even the crude curves of the railway, 
can utterly deform the suavity of contour of 
one bay after another along the whole reach 
of the Riviera. And of all this, he has only a 
cold head knowledge that is divorced from 
enjoyment. He recognises with his intelli- 
gence that this thing and that thing is beau- 
tiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to 
confess that it is not beautiful for him. It is 
in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; 
in vain that he chooses out points of view, 
and stands there, looking with all his eyes, 
and waiting for some return of the pleasure 
that he remembers in other days, as the sick 
folk may have awaited the coming of the 
angel at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an 
enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, 
indifferent tourist. There is some one by who 
is out of sympathy with the scene, and is 
not moved up to the measure of the occa- 
sion; and that some one is himself The 
world is disenchanted for him. He seems to 
himself to touch things with muffled hands, 
and to see them through a veil. His life be- 
comes a palsied fumbling after notes that are 

123 



ORDERED SOUTH 

silent when he has found and struck them. 
He cannot recognise that this phlegmatic 
and unimpressionable body with which he 
now goes burthened, is the same that he 
knew heretofore so quick and delicate and 
alive. 

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very 
softness and amenity of the climate, and to 
fancy that in the rigours of the winter at 
home, these dead emotions would revive 
and flourish. A longing for the brightness 
and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such 
times. He is homesick for the hale rough 
weather; for the tracery of the frost upon 
his window-panes at morning, the reludant 
descent of the first flakes, and the white 
roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And 
yet the stuff of which these yearnings are 
made is of the flimsiest; if but the ther- 
mometer fall a little below its ordinary Med- 
iterranean level, or a wind come down from 
the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his 
fancies changes upon the instant, and many 
a doleful vignette of the grim wintry streets 
at home returns to him, and begins to haunt 
his memory. The hopeless, huddled attitude 
124 



ORDERED SO UTH 

of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait 
of barefoot children on the icy pavement; 
the sheen of the rainy streets towards after- 
noon; the meagre anatomy of the poor de- 
fined by the clinging of wet garments; the 
high canorous note of the North-easter on 
days when the very houses seem to stiffen 
with cold: these, and such as these, crowd 
back upon him, and mockingly substitute 
themselves for the fanciful winter scenes 
with which he had pleased himself a while 
before. He cannot be glad enough that he is 
where he is. If only the others could be there 
also ; if only those tramps could lie down for 
a little in the sunshine, and those children 
warm their feet, this once, upon a kindlier 
earth ; if only there were no cold anywhere, 
and no nakedness, and no hunger; if only it 
were as well with all men as it is with him ! 
For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, 
after all. If it is only rarely that anything 
penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, 
yet, when anything does, it brings with it 
a joy that is all the more poignant for its very 
rarity. There is something pathetic in these 
occasional returns of a glad adivity of heart. 

125 



ORDERED SOUTH 

In his lowest hours he will be stirred and 
awakened by many such; and they will 
spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as 
a friend once said to me, the " spirit of de- 
light " comes often on small wings. For the 
pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is 
essentially capricious. It comes sometimes 
when we least look for it; and sometimes, 
when we exped it most certainly, it leaves 
us to gape joyously for days together, in the 
very home-land of the beautiful. We may 
have passed a place a thousand times and 
one; and on the thousand and second it will 
be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain 
splendour of reality from the dull circle of 
surroundings; so that we see it "with a 
child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw 
the daffodils by the lake side. And if this 
falls out capriciously with the healthy, how 
much more so with the invalid. Some day 
he will find his first violet, and be lost in 
pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold 
earth of the clods, and the vapid air and 
rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich 
and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps 
he may see a group of washerwomen re- 
126 



ORDERED SOUTH 

lieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue 
sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the 
tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and 
something significant or monumental in the 
grouping, something in the harmony of faint 
colour that is always charaderistic of the 
dress of these southern women, will come 
home to him unexpectedly, and awake in 
him that satisfaction with which we tell 
ourselves that we are the richer by one more 
beautiful experience. Or it may be some- 
thing even shghter: as when the opulence 
of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost 
and fails to produce its effeCl on the large 
scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the 
chance isolation — as he changes the posi- 
tion of his sunshade — of a yard or two of 
roadway with its stones and weeds. And 
then, there is no end to the infinite variety 
of the olive-yards themselves. Even the 
colour is indeterminate and continually shift- 
ing: now you would say it was green, now 
gray, now blue ; now tree stands above tree, 
like*' cloud on cloud," massed into filmy 
indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, 
the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken 

127 



ORDERED SOUTH 

upwith little momentary silveringsandshad- 
ows. But everyone sees the world in his own 
way. To some the glad moment may have 
arrived on other provocations ; and their rec- 
olle(5lion may be most vivid of the stately 
gait of women carrying burthens on their 
heads; of tropical effefts, with canes and 
naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of cy- 
presses; of the troubled,busy-lookinggroups 
of sea-pines, that seem always as if they 
were being wielded and swept together by 
a whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with 
virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and the 
scented underwood; of the empurpled hills 
standing up, solemn and sharp, out of the 
green-gold air of the east at evening. 

There go many elements, without doubt, 
to the making of one such moment of in- 
tense perception; and it is on the happy 
agreement of these many elements, on the 
harmonious vibration of many nerves, that 
the whole delight of the moment must de- 
pend. Who can forget how, when he has 
chanced upon some attitude of complete 
restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to and 
fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion 
128 



ORDERED SOUTH 

ofthe landscape has been changed for him, as 
though the sun had just broken forth, or a 
great artist had only then completed, by 
some cunning touch, the composition ofthe 
picture ? And not only a change of posture — 
a snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of 
a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air 
from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a 
travelling cloud, the merest nothing that 
sends a little shiver along the most infini- 
tesimal nerve of a man's body — not one of 
the least of these but has a hand somehow 
in the general effeft, and brings some re- 
finement of its own into the charader ofthe 
pleasure we feel. 

And if the external conditions are thus 
varied and subtle, even more so are those 
within our own bodies. No man can find 
out the world, says Solomon, from begin- 
ning to end, because the world is in his heart ; 
and so it is impossible for any of us to un- 
derstand, from beginning to end, that agree- 
ment of harmonious circumstances that cre- 
ates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, 
precisely because some of these circum- 
stances are hidden from us for ever in the 

129 



ORDERED SOUTH 

constitution of our own bodies. After we 
have reckoned up all that we can see or hear 
or feel, there still remains to be taken into 
account some sensibility more delicate than 
usual in the nerves affeded, or some ex- 
quisite refinement in the architecture of the 
brain, which is indeed to the sense of the 
beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense 
of hearing or sight. We admire splendid 
views and great pictures; and yet what is 
truly admirable is rather the mind within 
us, that gathers together these scattered de- 
tails for its delight, and makes out of cer- 
tain colours, certain distributions of gradu- 
ated light and darkness, that intelligible 
whole which alone we call a pidure or a 
view. Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays 
how he went on foot from one great man's 
house to another's in search of works of 
art, begins suddenly to triumph over these 
noble and wealthy owners, because he was 
more capable of enjoying their costly pos- 
sessions than they were; because they had 
paid the money and he had received the 
pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for self- 
complacency. While the ont man was work- 
130 



ORDERED SO UTH 

ing to be able to buy the pidure, the other 
was working to be able to enjoy the pic- 
ture. An inherited aptitude will have been 
diligently improved in either case; only the 
one man has made for himself a fortune, and 
the other has made for himself a living spirit. 
It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I 
repeat, when the event shows a man to have 
chosen the better part, and laid out his life 
more wisely, in the long run, than those 
who have credit for most wisdom. And yet 
even this is not a good unmixed; and like 
all other possessions, although in a less de- 
gree, the possession of a brain that has been 
thus improved and cultivated, and made 
into the prime organ of a man's enjoyment, 
brings with it certain inevitable cares and 
disappointments. The happiness of such an 
one comes to depend greatly upon those 
fine shades of sensation that heighten and 
harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. 
And thus a degree of nervous prostration, 
that to other men would be hardly disagree- 
able, is enough to overthrow for him the 
whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare 
moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to 

131 



ORDERED SOUTH 

meet him wherever he goes with failure, and 
the sense oi want, and disenchantment of 
the world and life. 

It is not in such numbness of spirit only 
that the life of the invalid resembles a pre- 
mature old age. Those excursions that he 
had promised himself to finish, prove too 
long or too arduous for his feeble body, and 
the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. 
Many a white town that sits far out on the 
promontory, many a comely fold of wood 
on the mountain side, beckons and allures 
his imagination day after day, and is yet as 
inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and 
gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance 
grows upon him wonderfully; and after 
some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasi- 
ness of the first few days, he falls content- 
edly in with the restrictions of his weakness. 
His narrow round becomes pleasant and 
famihar to him as the cell to a contented 
prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of 
the mid race of adive life, he now falls out 
of the little eddy that circulates in the shal- 
low waters of the sanatorium. He sees the 
country people come and go about their 
132 



ORDERED SO UTH 

everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out 
in goodly pleasure parties; the stir of man's 
adivity is all about him, as he suns himself 
inertly in some sheltered corner; and he 
looks on with a patriarchal impersonality of 
interest, such as a man may feel when he 
pidures to himself the fortunes of his re- 
mote descendants, or the robust old age of 
the oak he has planted over-night. 

In this falling aside, in this quietude and 
desertion of other men, there is no inhar- 
monious prelude to the last quietude and 
desertion of the grave; in this dulness of 
the senses there is a gentle preparation for 
the final insensibility of death. And to him 
the idea of mortality comes in a shape less 
violent and harsh than is its wont, less as 
an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of in- 
finitesimal gradation, and the last step on 
a long decline of way. As we turn to and 
fro in bed, and every moment the move- 
ments grow feebler and smaller and the at- 
titude more restful and easy, until sleep 
overtakes us at a stride and we move no 
more, so desire after desire leaves him; day 
by day his strength decreases, and the circle 



ORDERED SOUTH 

of his adivity grows ever narrower; and 
he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned 
from the passion of life, thus gradually in- 
duced into the slumber of death, that when 
at last the end comes, it will come quietly 
and fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor 
spirits to the coming of the last enemy, 
surely it should be such a mild approach as 
this; not to hale us forth with violence, but 
to persuade us from a place we have no fur- 
ther pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, 
death that approaches as life that withdraws 
and withers up from round about him. He 
has outlived his own usefulness, and almost 
his own enjoyment; and if there is to be no 
recovery; if never again will he be young 
and strong and passionate, if the a6lual pres- 
ent shall be to him always like a thing read 
in a book or remembered out of the far- 
away past; if, in fad, this be veritably night- 
fall, he will not wish greatly for the con- 
tinuance of a twilight that only strains and 
disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await 
the perfed darkness. He will pray for Me- 
dea; when she comes, let her either rejuve- 
nate or slay. 
'34 



ORDERED SOUTH 

And yet the ties that still attach him to 
the world are many and kindly. The sight 
of children has a significance for him such 
as it may have for the aged also, but not 
for others. If he has been used to feel hu- 
manely, and to look upon life somewhat 
more widely than from the narrow loophole 
of personal pleasure and advancement, it is 
strange how small a portion of his thoughts 
will be changed or embittered by this prox- 
imity of death. He knows that already, in 
English counties, the sower follows the 
ploughman up the face of the field, and the 
rooks follow the sower; and he knows also 
that he may not live to go home again and 
see the corn spring and ripen, and be cut 
down at last, and brought home with glad- 
ness. And yet the future of this harvest, the 
continuance of drought or the coming of 
rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as 
ever. For he has long been used to wait with 
interest the issue of events in which his own 
concern was nothing; and to be joyful in a 
plenty, and sorrowful for a famine, that did 
not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, 
the equable sufficiency of his own supply. 

135 



ORDERED SOUTH 

Thus there remain unaltered all the disin- 
terested hopes for mankind anda better future 
which have been the solace and inspiration 
of his life. These he has set beyond the reach 
of any fate that only menaces himself; and it 
makes small difference whether he die five 
thousand years, or five thousand and fifty 
years, before the good epoch for which he 
faithfully labours. He has not deceived him- 
self; he has known from the beginning that 
he followed the pillar of fire and cloud, only 
to perish himself in the wilderness, and that 
it was reserved for others to enter joyfully 
into possession of the land. And so, as every- 
thing grows grayer and quieter about him, 
and slopes towards extindion, these un- 
faded visions accompany his sad decline, 
and follow him, with friendly voices and 
hopeful words, into the very vestibule of 
death. The desire of love or of fame scarce- 
ly moved him, in his days of health, more 
strongly than these generous aspirations 
move him now; and so life is carried for- 
ward beyond life, and a vista kept open for 
the eyes of hope, even when his hands grope 
already on the fiice of the impassable. 
136 



ORDERED SOUTH 

V Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the 
thought of his friends; or, shall we not say 
rather, that by their thought for him, by their 
unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains 
woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the 
power of bodily dissolution to undo ? In a 
thousand ways will he survive and be per- 
petuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie sur- 
vived during all the years in which Mon- 
taigne continued to converse with him on 
the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much 
of what was truly Goethe was dead already 
when he revisited places that knew him no 
more, and found no better consolation than 
the promise of his own verses, that soon he 
too would be at rest. Indeed, when we 
think of what it is that we most seek and 
cherish, and find most pride and pleasure 
in calling ours, it will sometimes seem to 
us as if our friends, at our decease, would 
suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a 
monarch who should care more for the out- 
lying colonies he knows on the map or 
through the report of his vicegerents, than 
for the trunk of his empire under his eyes 
at home, are we not more concerned about 

137 



ORDERED SOUTH 

the shadowy life that we have in the hearts 
of others, and that portion in their thoughts 
and fancies which, in a certain far-away 
sense, belongs to us, than about the real 
knot of our identity — that central metrop- 
olis of self, of which alone we are immedi- 
ately aware — or the diligent service of ar- 
teries and veins and infinitesimal adivity 
of ganglia, which we know (as we know 
a proposition in Euclid) to be the source 
and substance of the whole ? At the death 
of every one whom we love, some fair and 
honourable portion of our existence falls 
away, and we are dislodged from one of 
these dear provinces; and they are not, per- 
haps, the most fortunate who survive a long 
series of such impoverishments, till their 
life and influence narrow gradually into the 
meagre limit of their own spirits, and death, 
when he comes at last, can destroy them 
at one blow. 

Note. — To this essay I must in honesty append a word 
or two of qualification ; for this is one of the points on 
which a slightly greater age teaches us a slightly differ- 
ent wisdom : 

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from 
'38 



ORDERED SO UTH 

particular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, him- 
self pursuing butterflies, but courteously lending his ap- 
plause to the advance of the human species and the com- 
ing of the kingdom of justice and love. As he grows 
older, he begins to think more narrowly of man's adion 
in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his own in 
the particular. He has not that same unspeakable trust in 
what he would have done had he been spared, seeing 
finally that that would have been little; but he has a far 
higher notion of the blank that he will make by dying. 
A young man feels himself one too many in the world; 
his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious 
utility; no ties, but to his parents, and these he is sure 
to disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has 
been made for this true cause of suffering in youth ; but 
by the mc.e faft of a prolonged existence, we outgrow 
either the fad or else the feeling. Either we become so 
callously accustomed to our own useless figure in the 
world, or else — and this, thank God, in the majority of 
cases — we so colled about us the interest or the love of 
our fellows, so multiply our effedive part in the affairs 
of life, that we need to entertain no longer the question 
of our right to be. 

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies 
himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very youth- 
ful view expressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has 
some to help, some to love, some to corred; it maybe, 
some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, 
but upon the man himself It is he, not another, who is 
one woman's son and a second woman's husband and a 
third woman's father. That life which began so small, has 

«39 



ORDERED SOUTH 

now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives of 
others. It is not indispensable; another will take the place 
and shoulder the discharged responsibility ; but the bet- 
ter the man and the nobler his purposes, the more will 
he be tempted to regret the extinftion of his powers and 
the deletion of his personality. To have lived a genera- 
tion, is not only to have grown at home in that perplex- 
ing medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. 
To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base, 
something of the air of a betrayal, A man does not only 
refled upon what he might have done in a future that is 
never to be his; but beholding himself so early a deserter 
from the fight, he eats his heart for the good he might 
have done already. To have been so useless and now to 
lose all hope of being useful any more — there it is that 
death and memory assail him. And even if mankind shall 
go on, founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, 
rising steadily from strength to strength; even if his work 
shall be fulfilled, his friends consoled, his wife remarried 
by a better than he; how shall this alter, in one jot, his 
estimation of a career which was his only business in this 
world, which was so fitfully pursued, and which is now 
so ineffedively to end ? 



140 




^S TRIPLEX 

'HE changes wrought by death are 
, in themselves so sharp and final, and 
so terrible and melancholy in their 
consequences, that the thing stands alone in 
man's experience, and has no parallel upon 
earth. It outdoes all other accidents because 
it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps sud- 
denly upon its vidims, like a Thug; some- 
times it lays a regular siege and creeps upon 
their citadel during a score of years. And 
when the business is done, there is sore 
havoc made in other people's lives, and a 
pin knocked out by which many subsidiary 
friendships hung together. There are empty 
chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at 
night. Again, in taking away our friends, 
death does not take them away utterly, but 
leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon 
intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly 
concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights 
and customs striking to the mind, from the 

141 



^S TRIPLEX 

pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule 
trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest per- 
sons have a bit of pageant going towards the 
tomb; memorial stones are set up over the 
least memorable; and, in order to preserve 
some show of resped for what remains of 
our old loves and friendships, we must ac- 
company it with much grimly ludicrous cere- 
monial, and the hired undertaker parades 
before the door. All this, and much more of 
the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence 
of poets, has gone a great way to put hu- 
manity in error; nay, in many philosophies 
the error has been embodied and laid down 
with every circumstance of logic; although 
in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving 
people little time to think, have not left them 
time enough to go dangerously wrong in 
pradice. 

As a matter of fad, although few things 
are spoken of with more fearful whisperings 
than this prosped of death, few have less in- 
fluence on condud under healthy circum- 
stances. We have all heard of cities in South 
America built upon the side of fiery moun- 
tains, and how, even in this tremendous 
142 



^S TRIPLEX 

neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot 
more impressed by the solemnity of mortal 
conditions than if they were delving gardens 
in the greenest corner of England. There are 
serenades and suppers and much gallantry 
among the myrtles overhead; and mean- 
while the foundation shudders underfoot, 
the bowels of the mountain growl, and at 
any moment living ruin may leap sky-high 
into the moonlight, and tumble man and his 
merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of 
very young people, and very dull old ones, 
there is something indescribably reckless 
and desperate in such a pidure. It seems 
not credible that respectable married people, 
with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit 
of supper within quite a long distance of a 
fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell 
of high-handed debauch when it is carried 
onso close to a catastrophe; and even cheese 
and salad, it seems, could hardly be relished 
in such circumstances without something 
like a defiance of the Creator. It should be a 
place for nobody but hermits dwelling in 
prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils 
drowning care in a perpetual carouse. 

'43 



^S TRIPLEX 

And yet, when one comes to think upon it 
calmly, the situation of theseSouth American 
citizens forms only a very pale figure for the 
state of ordinary mankind. This world itself, 
travelling blindly and swiftly in over crowd- 
ed space, among a million other worlds trav- 
elling blindly and swiftly in contrary direc- 
tions, may very well come by a knock that 
would setitinto explosion like a penny squib. 
And what, pathologically looked at, is the 
human body with all its organs, but a mere 
bagful of petards .? The least of these is as 
dangerous to the whole economy as the 
ship's powder-magazine to the ship; and 
with every breath we breathe, and every 
meal we eat, we are putting one or more of 
them in peril. If we clung as devotedly as 
some philosophers pretend we do to the ab- 
stract idea of life, or were half as frightened 
as they make out we are, for the subversive 
accident that ends it all, the trumpets might 
sound by the hour and no one would follow 
them into battle — the blue-peter might fly 
at the truck, but who would climb into a 
sea-going ship? Think (if these philosophers 
were right) with what a preparation of spirit 

'44 



^S TRIPLEX 

we should affront the daily peril of the din- 
ner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle- 
field in history, where the far greater propor- 
tion of our ancestors have miserably left their 
bones! What woman would ever be lured 
into marriage, so much more dangerous than 
the wildest seaPAnd what woulditbeto grow 
old? For, after a certain distance, every step 
we take in life we find the ice growing thin- 
ner below our feet, and all around us and 
behind us we see our contemporaries going 
through. By the time a man gets well into 
the seventies, his continued existence is a 
mere miracle ; and when he lays his old bones 
in bed for the night, there is an overwhelm- 
ing probability that he will never see the day. 
Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fad? 
Why, no. They were never merrier; they 
have their grog at night, and tell the raciest 
stories; they hear of the death of people 
about their own age, or even younger, not 
as if it was a grisly warning, but with a 
simple childlike pleasure at having outlived 
some one else; and when a draught might 
puff them out like a guttering candle, or a 
bit of a stumble shatter them like so much 

145 



^S TRIPLEX 

glass, their old hearts keep sound and un- 
affrighted, and they go on, bubbling with 
laughter, through years of man's age com- 
pared to which the valley at Balaklava was 
as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green 
on Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if 
we look to the peril only) whether it was a 
much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge 
into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of 
ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into 
bed. 

Indeed, it is a memorable subjed for con- 
sideration, with what unconcern and gaiety 
mankind pricks on along the Valley of the 
Shadow of Death. The whole way is one 
wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for 
those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable 
ruin. And yet we go spinning through it all, 
like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader 
remembers one of the humorous devices of 
the deified Caligula: how he encouraged a 
vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his 
bridge over Baiae bay; and when they were 
in the height of their enjoyment, turned 
loose the Praetorian guards among the com- 
pany, and had them tossed into the sea. 
146 



y^S TRIPLEX 

This is no bad miniature of the dealings of 
nature with the transitory race of man. Only, 
what a chequered picnic we have of it, even 
while it lasts! and into what great waters, 
not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's 
pale Praetorian throws us over in the end! 
We live the time that a match flickers; 
we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and 
the earthquake swallows us on the instant. 
Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, 
in the highest sense of human speech, in- 
credible, that we should think so highly of 
the ginger-beer, and regard so little the de- 
vouring earthquake? The love of Life and the 
fear of Death are two famous phrases that 
grow harder to understand the more we 
think about them. It is a well-known fa6l 
that an immense proportion of boat acci- 
dents would never happen if people held the 
sheet in their hands instead of making it 
fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of 
a professional mariner or some landsman 
with shattered nerves, every one of God's 
creatures makes it fast. A strange instance 
of man's unconcern and brazen boldness in 
the face of death ! 

'47 



^S TRIPLEX 

We confound ourselves with metaphysi- 
cal phrases, which we import into daily talk 
with noble inappropriateness. We have no 
idea of what death is, apart from its circum- 
stances and some of its consequences to 
others; and although we have some experi- 
ence of living, there is not a man on earth 
who has flown so high into abstradion as 
to have any practical guess at the meaning 
of the word life. All literature, from Job and 
Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt 
Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon 
the human state with such largeness of view 
as shall enable us to rise from the considera- 
tion of living to the Definition of Life. And 
our sages give us about the best satisfaction 
in their power when they say that it is a 
vapour, or a show, or made out of the same 
stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more 
rigid sense, has been at the same work for 
ages; and after a myriad bald heads have 
wagged over the problem, and piles of 
words have been heaped one upon another 
into dry and cloudy volumes without end, 
philosophy has the honour of laying before 
us, with modest pride, her contribution to- 
148 



y^S TRIPLEX 

wards the subject: that life is a Permanent 
Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! 
A man may very well love beef, or hunting, 
or a woman ; but surely, surely, not a Per- 
manent Possibility of Sensation! He may be 
afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large 
enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's 
man; but not certainly of abstrad death. 
We may trick with the word life in its dozen 
senses until we are weary of tricking; we 
may argue in terms of all the philosophies 
on earth, but one fad remains true through- 
out — that we do not love life, in the sense 
that we are greatly preoccupied about its 
conservation; that we do not, properly 
speaking, love life at all, but living. Into the 
views of the least careful there will enter 
some degree of providence; no man's eyes 
are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but 
although we have some anticipation of good 
health, good weather, wine, adive employ- 
ment, love, and self-approval, the sum of 
these anticipations does not amount to any- 
thing like a general view of life's possibili- 
ties and issues; nor are those who cherish 
them most vividly, at all the most scrupu- 

149 



yES TRIPLEX 

lous of their personal safety. To be deeply 
interested in the accidents of our existence, 
to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human 
experience, rather leads a man to disregard 
precautions, and risk his neck against a 
straw. For surely the love of living is 
stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a 
peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff 
fence, than in a creature who lives upon a 
diet and walks a measured distance in the 
interest of his constitution. 

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense 
talked upon both sides of the matter: tear- 
ing divines reducing life to the dimensions 
of a mere funeral procession, so short as to 
be hardly decent; and melancholy unbe- 
lievers yearning for the tomb as if it were 
a world too far away. Both sides must feel 
a little ashamed of their performances now 
and again when they draw in their chairs to 
dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of 
wine is an answer to most standard works 
upon the question. When a man's heart 
warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal 
of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of 
contemplation. Death may be knocking at 
150 



^S TRIPLEX 

the door, like the Commander's statue; we 
have something else in hand, thank God, and 
let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all 
the world over. All the world over, and 
every hour, some one is parting company 
with all his aches and ecstasies. For us also 
the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life 
that we have no leisure to entertain the ter- 
ror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all 
through, and none of the longest. Small 
blame to us if we give our whole hearts to 
this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, 
to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the 
mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, 
and the pride of our own nimble bodies. 

We all of us appreciate the sensations; 
but as for caring about the Permanence of 
the Possibility, a man's head is generally 
very bald, and his senses very dull, before 
he comes to that. Whether we regard life 
as a lane leading to a dead wall — a mere 
bag's end, as the French say — or whether 
we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, 
where we wait our turn and prepare our fac- 
ulties for some more noble destiny; whether 
we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little athe« 

»5i 



^S TRIPLEX 

istic poetry-books, about its vanity and brev- 
ity; whetherwe look justly for years of health 
and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath- 
chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each 
and all of these views and situations there 
is but one conclusion possible: that a man 
should stop his ears against paralysing ter- 
ror, and run the race that is set before him 
with a single mind. No one surely could have 
recoiled with more heartache and terror from 
the thought of death than our respeded lex- 
icographer; and yet we know how little it 
affeded his condud, how wisely and boldly 
he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein 
he spoke of life. Already an old man, he ven- 
tured on his Highland tour; and his heart, 
bound with triple brass, did not recoil before 
twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As 
courage and inteUigence are the two qualities 
best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is 
the first part of intelligence to recognise our 
precarious estate in life, and the first part of 
courage to be not at all abashed before the 
fad. A frank and somewhat headlong car- 
riage, not looking too anxiously before, not 
dallying in maudlin regret over the past, 
152 



^S TRIPLEX 

stamps the man who is well armoured for 
this world. 

And not only well armoured for himself, 
but a good friend and a good citizen to 
boot. We do not go to cowards for tender 
dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; 
the man who has least fear for his own car- 
case, has most time to consider others. 
That eminent chemist who took his walks 
abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly 
upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for 
him in considerate dealings with his own di- 
gestion= So soon as prudence has begun to 
grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, 
it finds its first expression in a paralysis of 
generous ads. The vi6lim begins to shrink 
spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours 
with a regulated temperature, and takes 
his morality on the principle of tin shoes 
and tepid milk. The care of one important 
body or soul becomes so engrossing, that 
all the noises of the outer world begin to 
come thin and faint into the parlour with 
the regulated temperature ; and the tin shoes 
go equably forward over blood and rain. To 
be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple- 

153 



yES TRIPLEX 

monger ends by standing stockstill. Now 
the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and 
a good whirling weathercock of a brain, 
who reckons his life as a thing to be dash- 
ingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes 
a very different acquaintance of the world, 
keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and 
gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be run- 
ning towards anything better than wildfire, 
he may shoot up and become a constellation 
in the end. Lord look after his health. Lord 
have a care of his soul, says he; and he has 
at the key of the position, and swashes 
through incongruity and peril towards his 
aim. Death is on all sides of him with point- 
ed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us ; 
unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim- 
mouthed friends and relations hold up their 
hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about 
his path : and what cares he for all this } Be- 
ing a true lover of living, a fellow with 
something pushing and spontaneous in his 
inside, he must, like any other soldier, in 
any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on 
at his best pace until he touch the goal. " A 
peerage or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nel- 
154 



^S TRIPLEX 

son in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. 
These are great incentives; not for any of 
these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, 
of being about their business in some sort 
or other, do the brave, serviceable men of 
every nation tread down the nettle danger, 
and pass flyingly over all the stumbling- 
blocks of prudence. Think of the heroism of 
Johnson, think of that superb indifference 
to mortal limitation that set him upon his 
-dictionary, and carried him through tri- 
umphantly until the end! Who, if he were 
wisely considerate of things at large, would 
ever embark upon any work much more 
considerable than a halfpenny post card } 
Who would project a serial novel, after 
Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in 
mid-course .? Who would find heart enough 
to begin to live, if he dallied with the con- 
sideration of death .? 

CAnd, after all, what sorry and pitiful quib- 
bling all this is! To forego all the issues of 
living in a parlour with a regulated tempera- 
ture — as if that were not to die a hundred 
times over, and for ten years at a stretch ! 
As if it were not to die in one's own life- 

•55 



^S TRIPLEX 

time, and without even the sad immunities 
of death ! As if it were not to die, and yet be 
the patient spectators of our own pitiable 
change! The Permanent Possibihty is pre- 
served, but the sensations carefully held at 
arm's length, as if one kept a photographic 
plate in a dark chamber. It is better to lose 
health like a spendthrift than to waste it 
like a miser. It is better to live and be done 
with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. 
By all means begin your folio; even if the 
doctor does not give you a year, even if he 
hesitates about a month, make one brave 
push and see what can be accomplished in 
a week. It is not only in finished undertak- 
ings that we ought to honour useful labour. 
A_spirit goes out of the man who means 
execution, which outlives the most untimely 
ending. All who have meant good work 
with their whole hearts, have done good 
work, although they may die before they 
have the time to sign it. Every heart that 
has beat strong and cheerfully has left a 
hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and 
bettered the tradition of mankind. And even 
if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and 
156 



^S TRIPLEX 

in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and 
planning monstrous foundations, flushed 
with hope, and their mouths full of boast- 
ful language, they should be at once tripped 
up and silenced: is there not something 
brave and spirited in such a termination? 
and does not life go down with a better 
grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, 
than miserably straggling to an end in sandy 
deltas? When the Greeks made their fine 
saying that those whom the gods love die 
young, 1 cannot help believing they had this 
sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at 
whatever age it overtake the man, this is to 
die young. Death has not been suffered to 
take so much as an illusion from his heart. 
In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest 
point of being, he passes at a bound on to 
the other side. The noise of the mallet and 
chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets 
are hardly done blowing, when, trailing 
with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, 
full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual 
land.j 



»57 




EL DORADO 

[T seems as if a great deal were at- 
tainable in a world where there are 
so many marriages and decisive bat- 
tles, and where we all, at certain hours of 
the day, and with great gusto and despatch, 
stow a portion ofviduals finally and irre- 
trievably into the bag which contains us. 
And it would seem also, on a hasty view, 
that the attainment of as much as possible 
was the one goal of man's contentious life. 
And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a 
semblance. We live in an ascending scale 
when we live happily, one thing leading to 
another in an endless series. There is always 
a new horizon for onward-looking men, and 
although we dwell on a small planet, im- 
mersed in petty business and not enduring 
beyond a brief period of years, we are so con- 
stituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like 
stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged 
until the term of life. To be truly happy is a 

.58 



EL DORADO 

question of how we begin and not of how 
we end, of what we want and not of what 
we have. An aspiration is a joy for ever, a 
possession as solid as a landed estate, a for- 
tune which we can never exhaust and 
which gives us year by year a revenue of 
pleasurable activity. To have many of these 
is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very 
dull and ill-direded theatre unless we have 
some interests in the piece; and to those 
who have neither art nor science, the world 
is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough 
footway where they may very well break 
their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires 
and curiosities that any man continues to 
exist with even patience, that he is charmed 
by the look of things and people, and that 
he wakens every morning with a renewed 
appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and 
curiosity are the two eyes through which 
he sees the world in the most enchanted 
colours: it is they that make women beau- 
tiful or fossils interesting: and the man may 
squander his estate and come to beggary, 
but if he keeps these two amulets he is still 
rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose 

159 



EL DORADO 

he could take one meal so compa(ft and 
comprehensive that he should never hunger 
any more; suppose him, at a glance, to 
take in all the features of the world and allay 
the desire for knowledge; suppose him to 
do the like in any province of experience — 
would not that man be in a poor way for 
amusement ever after? 

One who goes touring on foot with a 
single volume in his knapsack reads with 
circumspection, pausing often to refled;, and 
often laying the book down to contemplate 
the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour ; 
for he fears to come to an end of his enter- 
tainment, and be left companionless on the 
last stages of his journey. A young fellow 
recently finished the works of Thomas Car- 
lyle, winding up, if we remember aright, 
with the ten note-books upon Frederick the 
Great. "What!" cried the young fellow, in 
consternation, "is there no more Carlyle? 
Am 1 left to the daily papers ?' ' A more cele- 
brated instance is that of Alexander, who 
wept bitterly because he had no more worlds 
to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished 
the Decline and Fall, he had only a few 
160 



EL DORADO 

moments of joy; and it was with a "sober 
melancholy " that he parted from his labours. 
Happily we all shoot at the moon with 
ineffedual arrows ; our hopes are set on in- 
accessible El Dorado ; we come to an end 
of nothing here below. Interests are only 
plucked up to sow themselves again, like 
mustard. You would think, when the child 
was born, there would be an end to trouble; 
and yet it is only the beginning of fresh 
anxieties ; and when you have seen it through 
its teething and its education, and at last its 
marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, 
new quivering sensibilities, with every day; 
and the health of your children's children 
grows as touching a concern as that of your 
own. Again, when you have married your 
wife, you would think you were got upon a 
hilltop, and might begin to go downward 
by an easy slope. But you have only ended 
courting to begin marriage. Falling in love 
and winning love are often difficult tasks to 
overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to 
keep in love is also a business of some im- 
portance, to which both man and wife must 
bring kindness and goodwill. The true love 

161 



EL DORADO 

story commences at the altar, when there 
lies before the married pair a most beautiful 
contest of wisdom and generosity, and a 
life-long struggle towards an unattainable 
ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattain- 
able, from the very fad that they are two 
instead of one. 

"Of making books there is no end," com- 
plained the Preacher; and did not perceive 
how highly he was praising letters as an 
occupation. There is no end, indeed, to 
making books or experiments, or to travel, 
or to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise 
to problem. We may study for ever, and we 
are never as learned as we would. We have 
never made a statue worthy of our dreams. 
And when we have discovered a continent, 
or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to 
find another ocean or another plain upon the 
further side. In the infinite universe there is 
room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. 
It is not like the works of Carlyle, which can 
be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in 
a private park, or in the neighbourhood of a 
single hamlet, the weather and the seasons 
keep so deftly changing that although we 
162 



EL DORADO 

walk there for a lifetime there will be always 
something new to startle and delight us. 

There is only one wish realisable on the 
earth; only one thing that can be perfectly 
attained : Death. And from a variety of 
circumstances we have no one to tell us 
whether it be worth attaining. 

A strange pidure we make on our way to 
our chimaeras, ceaselessly marching, grudg- 
ing ourselves the time for rest ; indefatigable, 
adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall 
never reach the goal; it is even more than 
probable that there is no such place; and if 
we lived for centuries and were endowed 
with the powers of a god, we should find 
ourselves not much nearer what we wanted 
at the end. 'D toiling hands of mortals! O un- 
wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither ! 
Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come 
forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but 
a little way further, against the setting sun, 
descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye 
know your own blessedness; for to travel 
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and 
the true success is to labour. 



163 




THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

"Whether it be wise in men to do such adions or no, 
I am sure it is so in States to honour them." — Sir Wil- 
liam Temple. 

'HERE is one story of the wars of 
Rome which I have always very 
much envied for England. Ger- 
manicus was going down at the head of the 
legions into a dangerous river — on the op- 
posite bank the woods were full of Germans 
— when there flew out seven great eagles 
which seemed to marshal the Romans on 
their way ; they did not pause or waver, but 
disappeared into the forest where the enemy 
lay concealed. '* Forward! " cried Germani- 
cus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration, ''For- 
ward! and follow the Roman birds." It 
would be a very heavy spirit that did not 
give a leap at such a signal, and a very timor- 
ous one that continued to have any doubt of 
success. To appropriate the eagles as fellow- 
countrymen was to make imaginary allies of 
164 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and 
its military fortunes, and along with these 
the prospers of those individual Roman 
legionaries now fording a river in Germany, 
looked altogether greater and more hopeful. 
It is a kind of illusion easy to produce. A 
particular shape of cloud, the appearance of 
a particular star, the holiday of some particu- 
lar saint, anything in short to remind the 
combatants of patriotic legends or old suc- 
cesses, may be enough to change the issue 
of a pitched battle; for it gives to the one 
party a feeling that Right and the larger in- 
terests are with them. 

If an Englishman wishes to have such a 
feeling, it must be about the sea. The lion 
is nothing to us; he has not been taken to 
the hearts of the people, and naturalised as 
an English emblem. We know right well 
that a lion would fall foul of us as grimly as 
he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian 
Jew, and we do not carry him before us in 
the smoke of battle. But the sea is our ap- 
proach and bulwark; it has been the scene 
of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and 
we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim 

165 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

it as our own. The prostrating experiences 
of foreigners between Calais and Dover have 
always an agreeable side to English prepos- 
sessions. A man from Bedfordshire, who 
does not know one end of the ship from the 
other until she begins to move, swaggers 
among such persons with a sense of heredi- 
tary nautical experience. To suppose your- 
self endowed with natural parts for the sea 
because you are the countryman of Blake 
and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just as un- 
warrantable as to imagine Scotch extraction 
a sufficient guarantee that you will look well 
in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated 
beyond the reach of argument. We should 
consider ourselves unworthy of our descent 
if we did not share the arrogance of our pro- 
genitors, and please ourselves with the pre- 
tension that the sea is English. Even where 
it is looked upon by the guns and battle- 
ments of another nation we regard it as a 
kind of English cemetery, where the bones 
of our seafaring fathers take their rest until 
the last trumpet; for I suppose no other na- 
tion has lost as many ships, or sent as many 
brave fellows to the bottom. 
1 66 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

There is nowhere such a background for 
heroism as the noble, terrifying, and pictur- 
esque conditions of some of our sea fights. 
Hawke's battle in the tempest, and Aboukir 
at the moment when the French Admiral 
blew up, reach the hmit of what is imposing 
to the imagination. And our naval annals 
owe some of their interest to the fantastic 
and beautiful appearance of old warships 
and the romance that invests the sea and 
everything sea-going in the eyes of English 
lads on a half-holiday at the coast. Nay, and 
what we know of the misery between decks 
enhances the bravery of what was done by 
giving it something for contrast. We like to 
know that these bold and honest fellows 
contrived to live, and to keep bold and hon- 
est, among absurd and vile surroundings. 
No reader can forget the description of the 
Thunderin Roderick Ran dom : thedisovderly 
tyranny ; the cruelty and dirt of officers and 
men ; deck after deck, each with some new 
objetft of offence ; the hospital, where the 
hammocks were huddled together with but 
fourteen inches space for each ; the cockpit, 
far under water, where, "in an intolerable 

167 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

stench," the spectacled steward kept the ac- 
countsofthedifferentmesses;andthecanvas 
enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan 
made flip and salmagundi, smoked his pipe, 
sang his Welsh songs, and swore his queer 
Welsh imprecations. There are portions of 
this business on board the Thunder over 
which the reader passes lightly and hur- 
riedly, like a traveller in a malarious country. 
It is easy enough to understand the opinion 
of Dr. Johnson: *'Why, sir," he said, '*no 
man will be a sailor who has contrivance 
enough to get himself into a jail. " You would 
fancy any one's spirit would die out under 
such an accumulation of darkness, noisome- 
ness, and injustice, above all when he had 
not come there of his own free will, but un- 
der the cutlasses and bludgeons of the press- 
gang. But perhaps a watch on deck in the 
sharp sea air put a man on his mettle again; 
a battle must have been a capital relief; and 
prize-money, bloodily earned and grossly 
squandered, opened the doors of the prison 
for a twinkling. Somehow or other, at least, 
this worst of possible lives could not overlie 
the spirit and gaiety of our sailors ; they did 
168 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

their duty as though they had some interest 
in the fortune of that country which so 
cruelly oppressed them, they served their 
guns merrily when it came to fighting, and 
they had the readiest ear for a bold, honour- 
able sentiment, of any class of men the world 
ever produced. 

Most men of high destinies have high- 
sounding names. Pym and Habakkuk may 
do pretty well, but they must not think to 
cope with the Cromwells and Isaiahs. And 
you could not find a better case in point 
than that of the English Admirals. Drake 
and Rooke and Hawke are picked names 
for men of execution. Frobisher, Rodney, 
Boscawen, Foul-Weather Jack Byron, are 
all good to catch the eye in a page of a naval 
history. Cloudesley Shovel is a mouthful of 
quaint and sounding syllables. Benbow has 
a bulldog quality that suits the man's char- 
after, and it takes us back to those English 
archers who were his true comrades for 
plainness, tenacity and pluck. Raleigh is 
spirited and martial, and signifies an ad of 
bold condud in the field. It is impossible to 
judge of Blake or Nelson, no names current 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

among men being worthy of such heroes. 
But still it is odd enough, and very appro- 
priate in this connexion, that the latter was 
greatly taken with his Sicilian title. 'The 
signification, perhaps, pleased him," says 
Southey; ** Duke of Thunder was what in 
Dahomey would have been called a strong 
name ; it was to a sailor's taste, and certain- 
ly to no man could it be more appHcable." 
Admiral in itself is one of the most satisfac- 
tory of distinctions; it has a noble sound 
and a very proud history; and Columbus 
thought so highly of it, that he enjoined his 
heirs to sign themselves by that title as long 
as the house should last. 

But it is the spirit of the men, and not 
their names, that I wish to speak about in 
this paper. That spirit is truly English; they, 
and not Tennyson's cotton-spinners or Mr. 
D'Arcy Thompson's Abstract Bagman, are 
the true and typical Englishmen. There may 
be more head of bagmen in the country, 
but human beings are reckoned by number 
only in political institutions. And the Ad- 
mirals are typical in the full force of the word. 
They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, 
170 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

but of a virtue in which most Englishmen 
can claim a moderate share; and what we 
admire in their lives is a sort of apotheosis 
of ourselves. Almost everybody in our land 
except humanitarians and a few persons 
whose youth has been depressed by excep- 
tionally aesthetic surroundings, can under- 
stand and sympathise with an Admiral or a 
prize-fighter. 1 do not wish to bracket Ben- 
bow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, 
they are pradically bracketed for admira- 
tion in the minds of many frequenters of 
ale-houses. If you told them about German- 
icus and the eagles, or Regulus going back 
to Carthage, they would very likely fall 
asleep ; but tell them about Harry Pearce and 
Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, 
and they put downtheir pipes to listen. I have 
by me a copy oi Boxiana, on the fly-leaves 
of which a youthful member of the fancy 
kept a chronicle of remarkable events and 
an obituary of great men. Here we find pi- 
ously chronicled the demise of jockeys, wa- 
termen, and pugilists — Johnny Moore, of 
the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom Spring, aged 
fifty-six; ''Pierce Egan, senior, writer of 

171 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

Boxiana, and other sporting works " — and 
among all these, the Duke of WeHington! 
If Benbow had lived in the time of this an- 
nalist, do you suppose his name would not 
have been added to the glorious roll ? In 
short, we do not all feel warmly towards 
Wesley or Laud, we cannot all take pleas- 
ure in Paradise Lost; but there are certain 
common sentiments and touches of nature 
by which the whole nation is made to feel 
kinship. A little while ago everybody from 
Hazlitt and John Wilson down to the im- 
becile creature who scribbled his register on 
the fly-leaves of Boxiana, felt a more or less 
shamefaced satisfaction in the exploits of 
prize-fighters. And the exploits of the Admi- 
rals are popular to the same degree, and tell 
in all ranks of society. Their sayings and 
doings stir English blood like the sound of a 
trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade 
of London, and all the outward and visible 
ensigns of our greatness should pass away, 
we should still leave behind us a durable 
monument of what we were in these say- 
ings and doings of the English Admirals. 
Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own 
172 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

flagship, the Venerable, and only one other 
vessel, heard that the whole Dutch fleet 
was putting to sea. He told Captain Hotham 
to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest 
part of the channel, and fight his vessel till 
she sank. "I have taken the depth of the 
water," added he, ''and when the Vener- 
able goes down, my flag will still fly." And 
you observe this is no naked Viking in a 
prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of 
Parliament, with a smattering of the classics, 
a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and 
flannel underclothing. In the same spirit. 
Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours 
flying; so that even if five were shot away, 
it should not be imagined he had struck. 
He too must needs wear his four stars out- 
side his Admiral's frock, to be a butt for 
sharpshooters. " In honour 1 gained them," 
he said to objedors, adding with sublime 
illogicality, "in honour I will die with 
them." Captain Douglas of the Royal Oak, 
when the Dutch fired his vessel in the 
Thames, sent his men ashore, but was 
burned along with herhimselfratherthan de- 
sert his post without orders. Just then, per- 

173 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

haps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth 
round the supper-table with the ladies of his 
court. When Raleigh sailed into Cadiz, and 
all the forts and ships opened fire on him at 
once, he scorned to shoot a gun, and made 
answer with a flourish of insulting trum- 
pets. I like this bravado better than the 
wisest dispositions to insure vi(ftory; it 
comes from the heart and goes to it. God 
has made nobler heroes, but he never made 
a finer gentleman than Walter Raleigh. 
And as our Admirals were full of heroic 
superstitions, and had a strutting and vain- 
glorious style of fight, so they discovered a 
startling eagerness for battle, and courted 
war like a mistress. When the news came 
to Essex before Cadiz that the attack had 
been decided, he threw his hat into the sea. 
It is in this way that a schoolboy hears of a 
half-hoHday ; but this was a bearded man of 
great possessions who had just been allowed 
to risk his life. Benbow could not he still in 
his bunk after he had lost his leg; he must 
be on deck in a basket to direfl and ani- 
mate the fight. I said they loved war like a 
mistress; yet I think there are not many 
174 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

mistresses we should continue to woo un- 
der similar circumstances. Trowbridge went 
ashore with the Ctilloden, and was able to 
take no part in the battle of the Nile. ''The 
merits of that ship and her gallant captain," 
wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, "are too 
well known to benefit by anything I could 
say. Her misfortune was great in getting 
aground, while her more fortunate com- 
panions were in the full tide of happiness. 
This is a notable expression, and depicts the 
whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of 
the English Admirals to a hair. It was to be 
''in the full tide of happiness " for Nelson to 
destroy five thousand five hundred and 
twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have 
his own scalp torn open by a piece of lang- 
ridge shot. Hear him again at Copenhagen: 
" A shot through the mainmast knocked the 
splinters about; and he observed to one of 
his officers with a smile, ' It is warm work, 
and this may be the last to any of us at any 
moment;' and then, stopping short at the 
gangway, added, with emotion, ' But, mark 
you — / would not be elsewhere for thou- 
sands.' " 

»75 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

I must tell one more story, which has 
lately been made familiar to us all, and that 
in one of the noblest ballads in the English 
language. 1 had written my tame prose ab- 
stra6l, 1 shall beg the reader to believe, 
when 1 had no notion that the sacred bard 
designed an immortality for Greenville. Sir 
Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral to 
Lord Thomas Howard, and lay off the 
Azores with the English squadron in 1591. 
He was a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, 
bullying fellow apparently; and it is related 
of him that he would chew and swallow 
wineglasses, by way of convivial levity, till 
the blood ran out of his mouth. When the 
Spanish fleet of fifty sail came within sight 
of the Enghsh, his ship, the Revenge, was 
the last to weigh anchor, and was so far 
circumvented by the Spaniards, that there 
were but two courses open — either to turn 
her back upon the enemy or sail through 
one of his squadrons. The first alternative 
Greenville dismissed as dishonourable to 
himself, his country, and her Majesty's ship. 
Accordingly, he chose the latter, and steered 
into the Spanish armament. Several vessels 
176 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

he forced to luff and fall under his lee ; until, 
about three o'clock of the afternoon, a great 
ship of three decks of ordnance took the 
wind out of his sails, and immediately 
boarded. Thenceforward, and all night long, 
the Revenge held her own single-handed 
against the Spaniards. As one ship was 
beaten off. another took its place. She en- 
dured, according to Raleigh's computation, 
*' eight hundred shot of great artillery, be- 
sides many assaults and entries." By morn- 
ing the powder was spent, the pikes all 
broken, not a stick was standing, '' nothing 
left overhead either for flight or defence; " 
six feet of water in the hold; almost all the 
men hurt; and Greenville himself in a dying 
condition. To bring them to this pass, a 
fleet of fifty sail had been mauhng them for 
fifteen hours, the Admiral of the Hulks and 
the Ascension of Seville had both gone down 
alongside, and two other vessels had taken 
refuge on shore in a sinking state. In Hawke's 
words, they had "taken a great deal of 
drubbing." The captain and crew thought 
they had done about enough; but Green- 
ville was not of this opinion; he gave orders 

177 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

to the master gunner, whom he knew to be 
a fellow after his own stamp, to scuttle the 
Revenge where she lay. The others, who 
were not mortally wounded like the Admiral, 
interfered with some decision, locked the 
master gunner in his cabin, after having de- 
prived him of his sword, for he manifested 
an intention to kill himself if he were not to 
sink the ship; and sent to the Spaniards to 
demand terms. These were granted. The 
second or third day after, Greenville died of 
his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship, 
leaving his contempt upon the ''traitors and 
dogs " who had not chosen to do as he did, 
and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully 
manned, with six inferior craft ravaged by 
sickness and short of stores. He at least, he 
said, had done his duty as he was bound to 
do, and looked for everlasting fame. 

Some one said to me the other day that 
they considered this story to be of a pesti- 
lent example. 1 am not inclined to imagine 
we shall ever be put into any practical diffi- 
culty from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And 
besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth 
of such adions is not a thing to be decided 
178 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of right- 
eous commonsense. The man who wished 
to make the ballads of his country, coveted 
a small matter compared to what Richard 
Greenville accomplished. I wonder how 
many people have been inspired by this mad 
story, and how many battles have been ac- 
tually won for England in the spirit thus 
engendered. It is only with a measure of 
habitual foolhardiness that you can be sure, 
in the common run of men, of courage on a 
reasonable occasion. An army or a fleet, if 
it is not led by quixotic fancies, will not be 
led far by terror of the Provost Marshal. 
Even German warfare, in addition to maps 
and telegraphs, is not above employing the 
IVacht am Rheiii. Nor is it only in the pro- 
fession of arms that such stories may do good 
to a man. In this desperate and gleeful fight- 
ing, whether it is Greenville or Benbow, 
Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in 
the ship, we see men brought to the test and 
giving proof of what we call heroic feeling. 
Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my 
club smoking-room, that they are a prey to 
prodigious heroic feelings, and that it costs 

•79 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

them more nobility of soul to do nothing in 
particular, than would carry on all the wars, 
by sea or land, of bellicose humanity. It may 
very well be so, and yet not touch the point 
in question. For what 1 desire is to see some 
of this nobility brought face to f^ice with me 
in an inspiriting achievement. A man may 
talk smoothly over a cigar in my club smok- 
ing-room from now to the Day of Judg- 
ment, without adding anything to man- 
kind's treasury of illustrious and encourag- 
ing examples. It is not over the virtues of a 
curate-and-tea-party novel, that people are 
abashed into high resolutions. It maybe be- 
cause their hearts are crass, but to stir them 
properly they must have men entering into 
glory with some pomp and circumstance. 
And that is why these stories of our sea- 
captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, 
and full of bracing moral influence, are more 
valuable to England than any material bene- 
fit in all the books of political economy be- 
tweenWestminsterand Birmingham. Green- 
ville chewing wineglasses at table makes no 
very pleasant figure, any more than a thou- 
sand other artists when they are viewed in 
180 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

the body, or met in private life ; but his work 
of art, his finished tragedy, is an eloquent 
performance; and I contend it ought not 
only to enliven men of the sword as they go 
into battle, but send back merchant clerks 
with more heart and spirit to their book- 
keeping by double entry. 

There is another question which seems 
bound up in this; and that is Temple's 
problem: whether it was wise of Douglas 
to burn with the Royal Oak ? and by impli- 
cation, what it was that made him do so? 
Many will tell you it was the desire of fame. 

"To what do Caesar and Alexander owe 
the infinite grandeur of their renown, but to 
fortune? How many men has she extin- 
guished in the beginning of their progress, 
of whom we have no knowledge; who 
brought as much courage to the work as 
they, if their adverse hap had not cut them 
off in the first sally of their arms ? Amongst 
so many and so great dangers, I do not re- 
member to have anywhere read that Caesar 
was ever wounded; a thousand have fallen 
in less dangers than the least of these he 
went through. A great many brave adions 

i8i 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

must be expected to be performed without 
witness, for one that comes to some notice. 
A man is not always at the top of a breach, 
or at the head of an army in the sight of his 
general, as upon a platform. He is often sur- 
prised between the hedge and the ditch; he 
must run the hazard of his life against a 
henroost; he must dislodge four rascally 
musketeers out of a barn ; he must prick out 
single from his party, as necessity arises, 
and meet adventures alone." 

Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic 
essay on Glory. Where death is certain, as 
in the cases of Douglas or Greenville, it 
seems all one from a personal point of view. 
The man who lost his life against a henroost, 
is in the same pickle with him who lost his 
life against a fortified place of the first or- 
der. Whether he has missed a peerage or 
only the corporal's stripes, it is all one if he 
has missed them and is quietly in the grave. 
It was by a hazard that we learned the con- 
duct of the four marines of the Wager. 
There was no room for these brave fellows 
in the boat, and they were left behind upon 
the island to a certain death. They were sol- 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

diers, they said, and knew well enough it 
was their business to die ; and as their com- 
rades pulled away, they stood upon the 
beach, gave three cheers, and cried ''God 
bless the king!" Now, one or two of those 
who were in the boat escaped, against all 
likelihood, to tell the story. That was a great 
thing for us; but surely it cannot, by any 
possible twisting of human speech, be con- 
strued into anything great for the marines. 
You may suppose, if you like, that they died 
hoping their behaviour would not be for- 
gotten; or you may suppose they thought 
nothing on the subjed, which is much more 
likely. What can be the signification of the 
word "fame " to a private of marines, who 
cannot read and knows nothing of past his- 
tory beyond the reminiscences of his grand- 
mother? But whichever supposition you 
make, the fad is unchanged. They died 
while the question still hung in the balance; 
and I suppose their bones were already 
white, before the winds and the waves and 
the humour of Indian chiefs and Span- 
ish governors had decided whether they 
were to be unknown and useless martyrs 

183 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

or honoured heroes. Indeed, I believe this is 
the lesson: if it is for fame that men do 
brave actions, they are only silly fellows 
after all. 

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank 
business to decompose adions into little 
personal motives, and explain heroism 
away. The Abstrad Bagman will grow like 
an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carp- 
ing, but in a heat of admiration. But there 
is another theory of the personal motive in 
these fine sayings and doings, which I be- 
lieve to be true and wholesome. People usu- 
ally do things, and suffer martyrdoms, 
because they have an inclination that way. 
The best artist is not the man who fixes his 
eye on posterity, but the one who loves the 
pradice of his art. And instead of having a 
taste for being successful merchants and re- 
tiring at thirty, some people have a taste for 
high and what we call heroic forms of ex- 
citement. If the Admirals courted war like a 
mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, 
the sailors came gaily out of the forecastle, 
— it is because a fight is a period of multi- 
plied and intense experiences, and, by Nel- 
184 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

son's computation, worth ''thousands" to 
any one who has a heart under his jacket. 
If the marines of the /^(^^^r gave three cheers 
and cried ''God bless the king," it was be- 
cause they liked to do things nobly for their 
own satisfaction. They were giving their 
lives, there was no help for that; and they 
made it a point of self-resped to give them 
handsomely. And there were never four hap- 
pier marines in God's world than these four 
at that moment. If it was worth thousands 
to be at the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arith- 
metician would calculate how much it was 
worth to be one of these four marines; or 
how much their story is worth to each of us 
who read it. And mark you, undemonstra- 
tive men would have spoiled the situation. 
The finest a6lion is the better for a piece of 
purple. If the soldiers of the Birkenhead had 
not gone down in line, or these marines of 
the Wager had walked away simply into the 
island, like plenty of other brave fellows in 
the like circumstances, my Benthamite arith- 
metician would assign a far lower value to 
the two stories. We have to desire a grand 
air in our heroes; and such a knowledge of 

185 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

the human stage as shall make them put the 
dots on their own i's, and leave us in no sus- 
pense as to when they mean to be heroic. 
And hence, we should congratulate ourselves 
upon the fad that our Admirals were not 
only great-hearted but big-spoken. 

The heroes themselves say, as often as 
not, that fame is their objed, but I do not 
think that is much to the purpose. People 
generally say what they have been taught 
to say; that was the catchword they were 
given in youth to express the aims of their 
way of life; and men who are gaining great 
battles are not likely to take much trouble in 
reviewing their sentiments and the words 
in which they were told to express them. 
Almost every person, if you will believe him- 
self, holds a quite different theory of life from 
the one on which he is patently ading. And 
the fad is, fame may be a forethought and 
an afterthought, but it is too abstrad an idea 
to move people greatly in moments of swift 
and momentous decision. It is from some- 
thing more immediate, some determination 
of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, 
that the breach is stormed or the bold word 
186 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting an ugly 
weir in a canoe has exadly as much thought 
about fame as most commanders going into 
battle; and yet the adion, fall out how it 
will, IS not one of those the muse delights 
to celebrate. Indeed it is difficult to see why 
the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet 
so formidable to look at, unless on the theory 
that he likes it. I susped that is why; and I 
susped It is at least ten per cent of why Lord 
Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated 
so much in the House of Commons, and 
why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day 
and why the Admirals courted war like a 
mistress. 




187 




SOME PORTRAITS BY 
RAEBURN 

•HROUGH the initiative of a promi- 
nent citizen, Edinburgh has been 
in possession, for some autumn 
weeks, of a gallery of paintings of singular 
merit and interest. They were exposed in 
the apartments of the Scotch Academy; and 
filled those who are accustomed to visit the 
annual spring exhibition, with astonishment 
and a sense of incongruity. Instead of the 
too common purple sunsets, and pea-green 
fields, and distances executed in putty and 
hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon 
him from the walls of room after room, a 
whole army of wise, grave, humorous, 
capable, or beautiful countenances, painted 
simply and strongly by a man of genuine 
instinct. It was a complete ad of the Human 
Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords and ladies, 
soldiers and dodors, hanging judges, and 
heretical divines, a whole generation of good 
1 88 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

society was resuscitated; and the Scotch- 
man of to-day walked amongthe Scotchmen 
of two generations ago. The moment was 
well chosen, neither too late nor too early. 
The people who sat for these pidures are not 
yet ancestors, they are still relations. They 
are not yet altogether a part of the dusty 
past,but occupy a middle distance within cry 
of our affedions. The little child who looks 
wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in 
the pidure, is now the veteran Sheriff emeri- 
tus of Perth. And I hear a story of a lady who 
returned the other day to Edinburgh, after 
an absence of sixty years : " 1 could see none 
of my old friends," she said, " until 1 went 
into the Raeburn Gallery, and found them 
all there." 

It would be difficult to say whether the 
colledion was more interesting on the score 
of unity or diversity. Where the portraits 
were all of the same period, almost all of the 
same race, and all from the same brush,there 
could not fail to be many points of similarity. 
And yet the similarity of the handling seems 
to throw into more vigorous relief those per- 
sonal distindions which Raeburn was so 

189 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

quick to seize. He was a born painter of 
portraits.fHe looked people shrewdly be- 
tween the eyes, surprised their manners in 
their face, and had possessed himself of what 
was essential in their charader before they 
had been many minutes in his studio. What 
he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to 
the canvas almost in the moment of concep- 
tion. He had never any difficulty, he said, 
about either hands or faces. About draperies 
or light or composition, he might see room 
for hesitation or afterthought. But a face or 
a hand was something plain and legible. 
There were no two ways about it, any more 
than about the person's name. And so each 
of his portraits are not only (in Do6tor John- 
son's phrase, aptly quoted on the catalogue) 
* * a piece of history, " but a piece of biography 
into the bargain. It is devoutly to be wished 
that all biography were equally amusing, 
and carried its own credentials equally upon 
its face. These portraits are racier than many 
anecdotes, and more complete than many a 
volume of sententious memoirs. You can see 
whether you get a stronger and clearer idea 
of Robertson the historian from Raeburn's 

IQO 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

palette or Dugald Stewart's woolly and eva- 
sive periods. And then the portraits are both 
signed and countersigned. For you have, 
first, the authority of the artist, whom you 
recognise as no mean critic of the looks and 
manners of men ; and next you have the tacit 
acquiescence ofthesubjed, who sits looking 
out upon you with inimitable innocence,and 
apparently under the impression that he is 
in a room by himself. For Raeburn could 
plunge at once through all the constraint and 
embarrassment of the sitter, and present the 
face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the 
most disengaged moments. /This is best seen 
in portraits where the sitter is represented 
in some appropriate adion: Neil Gow with 
his fiddle, Dodor Spens shooting an arrow, 
or Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above 
all, from this point of view, the portrait 
of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is notable. A 
strange enough young man, pink, fat about 
the lower part of the face, with a lean fore- 
head, a narrow nose and a fine nostril, sits 
with a drawing-board upon his knees. He 
has just paused to render himself account of 
some difficulty, to disentangle some com- 

191 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

plication of line or compare neighbouring 
values. And there, without any perceptible 
wrinkling, you have rendered for you ex- 
actly the fixed look in the eyes, and the un- 
conscious compression of the mouth, that 
befit and signify an effort of the kind. The 
whole pose, the whole expression, is abso- 
lutely dire6t and simple. You are ready to 
take your oath to it that Colonel Lyon had 
no idea he was sitting for his pidure, and 
thought of nothing in the world besides his 
own occupation of the moment. 

Although the colledion did not embrace, 
I understand, nearly the whole of Raeburn's 
works, it was too large not to contain some 
that were indifferent, whether as works of 
art or as portraits. Certainly the standard 
was remarkably high, and was wonderfully 
maintained, but there were one or two pic- 
tures that might have been almost as well 
away — one or two that seemed wanting in 
salt, and some that you can only hope were 
not successful likenesses. Neither of the por- 
traits of Sir Walter Scott, for instance, were 
very agreeable to look upon. You do not 
care to think that Scott looked quite so rustic 
192 



POR TRAITS BYRAEB URN 

and puffy. And where is that peaked fore- 
head which, accordingto all written accounts 
and many portraits, was the distinguishing 
charaderistic of his face ? Again, in spite of 
his own satisfaction and in spite of Dr, John 
Brown, I cannot consider that Raeburn was 
very happy in hands. Without doubt, he 
could paint one if he had taken the trouble 
to study it; but it was by no means always 
that he gave himself the trouble. Looking 
round one of these rooms hung about with 
his portraits, you were struck with the ar- 
ray of expressive faces, as compared with 
what you may have seen in looking round a 
room full of living people. But it was not so 
with the hands. The portraits differed from 
each other in face perhaps ten times as much 
as they differed by the hand; whereas with 
living people the two go pretty much to- 
gether; and where one is remarkable, the 
other will almost certainly not be common- 
place. 

One interesting portrait was that of Dun- 
can of Camperdown. He stands in uniform 
beside a table, his feet slightly straddled 
with the balance of an old sailor, his hand 

193 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

poised upon a chart by the finger tips. The 
mouth is pursed, the nostril spread and 
drawn up, the eyebrows very highly arched. 
The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of 
iron, and have the redness that comes from 
much exposure to salt sea winds. From 
the whole figure, attitude and countenance, 
there breathes something precise and de- 
cisive, something alert, wiry, and strong. 
You can understand, from the look of him, 
that sense, not so much of humour, as of 
what is grimmest and driest in pleasantry, 
which inspired his address before the fight 
at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the 
Dutch fleet under Admiral de Winter. * 'Gen- 
tlemen," says he, "you see a severe winter 
approaching; I have only to advise you to 
keep up a good fire. " Somewhat of this same 
spirit of adamantine drollery must have sup- 
ported him in the days of the mutiny at the 
Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his 
own flagship, the Venerable, and only one 
other vessel, and kept up adive signals, as 
though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, 
to intimidate the Dutch. 

Another portrait which irresistibly at- 
194 



POR TRAITS BYRAEB URN 

traded the eye, was the half-length of 
Robert M'Queen, of Braxfield, Lord Justice- 
Clerk. If I know gusto in painting when I 
see it, this canvas was painted with rare en- 
joyment. The tart, rosy, humorous look of 
the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face 
resting squarely on the jowl, has been 
caught and perpetuated with something 
that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly 
subtle expression haunts the lower part, 
sensual and incredulous, like that of a man 
tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it 
has been somewhat too long uncorked. 
From under the pendulous eyelids of old 
age, the eyes look out with a half-youthful, 
half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with no pretence 
to distinction, are folded on the judge's 
stomach. So sympathetically is the charader 
conceived by the portrait painter, that it is 
hardly possible to avoid some movement of 
sympathy on the part of the spedator. And 
sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart 
from humane considerations, because it sup- 
plies us with the materials for wisdom. It is 
probably more instrudive to entertain a 
sneaking kindness for any unpopular per- 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

son, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, 
than to give way to perfed raptures of moral 
indignation against his abstrad vices. He 
was the last judge on the Scotch bench to 
employ the pure Scotch idiom. His opinions, 
thus given in Doric, and conceived in a 
lively, rugged, conversational style, were 
full of point and authority. Out of the bar, 
or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a 
lover of wine, and one who ''shone pecu- 
liarly " at tavern meetings. He has left be- 
hind him an unrivalled reputation for rough 
and cruel speech; and to this day his name 
smacks of the gallows. It was he who pre- 
sided at the trials of Muir and Skirving in 
1793 and 1794; and his appearance on these 
occasions was scarcely cut to the pattern of 
to-day. His summing up on Muir began 
thus — the reader must supply for himself 
"the growling, blacksmith's voice" and the 
broad Scotch accent: "Now this is the 
question for consideration — Is the panel 
guilty of sedition, or is he not } Now, before 
this can be answered, two things must be 
attended to that require no proof: First, that 
the British constitution is the best that ever 



PORTRAITS BY RAEB URN 

was since the creation of the world, and it 
is not possible to make it better." It's a 
pretty fair start, is it not, for a political trial? 
A little later, he has occasion to refer to the 
relations of Muir with ** those wretches," 
the French. ' ' 1 never liked the French all my 
days," said his lordship, "but now I hate 
them." And yet a little further on : "A gov- 
ernment in any country should be like a 
corporation; and in this country it is made 
up of the landed interest, which alone has 
a right to be represented. As for the rabble 
who have nothing but personal property, 
what hold has the nation of them } They 
may pack up their property on their backs, 
and leave the country in the twinkling of an 
eye." After having made profession of senti- 
ment's so cynically anti-popular as these, 
when the trials were at an end, which was 
generally about midnight, Braxfield would 
walk home to his house in George Square 
with no better escort than an easy con- 
science. 1 think 1 see him getting his cloak 
about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a 
lantern in one hand, steering his way along 
the streets in the mirk January night. It 

197 



PORTRAITS BY RAEB URN 

might have been that very day that Skirving 
had defied him in these words: " It is alto- 
gether unavailing for your lordship to men- 
ace me; for I have long learned to fear not 
the face of man; " and I can fancy, as Brax- 
field refleded on the number of what he 
called Grumbletonians in Edinburgh, and of 
how many of them must bear special malice 
against so upright and inflexible a judge, 
nay, and might at that very moment be 
lurking in the mouth of a dark close with 
hostile intent — I can fancy that he indulged 
in a sour smile, as he reflected that he also 
was not especially afraid of men's faces or 
men's fists, and had hitherto found no occa- 
sion to embody this insensibility in heroic 
words. For if he was an inhumane old gen- 
tleman (and I am afraid it is a fa6l that he 
was inhumane), he was also perfedly intre- 
pid. You may look into the queer face of 
that portrait for as long as you will, but you 
will not see any hole or corner for timidity 
to enter in. 

Indeed, there would be no end to this 
paper if I were even to name half of the por- 
traits that were remarkable for their execu- 
198 



PORTRAITS BY RAEB URN 

tion, or interesting by association. There 
was one pidure of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane 
Hill, which you might palm off upon most 
laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by, you 
saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, 
that country gentleman who, playing with 
pieces of cork on his own dining-table, in- 
vented modern naval warfare. There was 
that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for which 
the old fiddler walked daily through the 
streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the 
Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Ers- 
kine, with his satirical nose and upper lip, 
and his mouth just open for a witticism to 
pop out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish 
raiment, and looking altogether trim and 
narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils 
than young ladies; full-blown John Robin- 
son, in hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and, 
every inch of him, a fine old man of the 
world; Constable the publisher, upright be- 
side a table, and bearing a corporation with 
commercial dignity; Lord Bannatyne hear- 
ing a cause, if ever anybody heard a cause 
since the world began; Lord Newton just 
awakened from clandestine slumber on the 

199 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

bench; and the second President Dundas, 
with every feature so fat that he reminds 
you, in his wig, of some droll old court offi- 
cer in an illustrated nursery story-book, and 
yet all these fat features instin(ft with mean- 
ing, the fat lips curved and compressed, the 
nose combining somehow the dignity of a 
beak with the good nature of a bottle, and 
the very double chin with an air of intelli- 
gence and insight. And all these portraits 
are so pat and telling, and look at you so 
spiritedly from the walls, that, compared 
with the sort of living people one sees about 
the streets, they are as bright new sovereigns 
to fishy and obliterated sixpences. Some dis- 
paraging thoughts upon our own generation 
could hardly fail to present themselves; but 
it is perhaps only the sacer vates who is 
wanting; and we also, painted by such a 
man as Carolus Duran, may look in holiday 
immortality upon our children and grand- 
children. 

Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are 
by no means of the same order of merit. No 
one, of course, could be insensible to the 
presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs. Camp- 



PORTRAITS BY RAEB URN 

bell of Possil. When things are as pretty as 
that, criticism is out of season. But, on the 
whole, it is only with women of a certain age 
that he can be said to have succeeded, in at 
all the same sense as we say he succeeded 
with men. The younger women do not seem 
to be made of good flesh and blood. They 
are not painted in rich and unduous touches. 
They are dry and diaphanous. And although 
young ladies in Great Britain are all that can 
be desired of them, I would fain hope they 
are not quite so much of that as Raeburn 
would have us believe. In all these pretty 
faces, you miss charader, you miss fire, you 
miss that spice of the devil which is worth 
all the prettiness in the world; and, what is 
worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies 
are not womanly to nearly the same degree 
as his men are masculine; they are so in a 
negative sense; in short, they are the typical 
young ladies of the male novelist. 

To say truth, either Raeburn was timid 
with young and pretty sitters; or he had 
stupefied himself with sentimentalities; or 
else (and here is about the truth of it) Rae- 
burn and the rest of us labour under an ob- 



PORTRAITS BY RAEB URN 

stinate blindness in one diredion, and know 
very little more about women after all these 
centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve. 
This is all the more likely, because we are 
by no means so unintelligent in the matter 
of old women. There are some capital old 
women, it seems to me, in books written by 
men. And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. 
Colin Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous 
"Old lady with a large cap," which are 
done in the same frank, perspicacious spirit 
as the very best of his men. He could look 
into their eyes without trouble; and he was 
not withheld, by any bashful sentimental- 
ism, from recognising what he saw there 
and unsparingly putting it down upon the 
canvas. But where people cannot meet with- 
out some confusion and a good deal of in- 
voluntary humbug, and are occupied, for as 
long as they are together, with a very differ- 
ent vein of thought, there cannot be much 
room for intelligent study nor much result in 
the shape of genuine comprehension. Even 
women, who understand men so well for 
practical purposes, do not know them well 
enough for the purposes of art. Take even 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

the very best of their male creations, take 
Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find 
he has an equivocal air, and every now and 
again remembers he has a comb at the back 
ofhishead.Ofcourse,no woman will believe 
this, and many men will be so very polite 
as to humour their incredulity. 




20; 




CHILD'S PLAY 

>HE regret we have for our child- 
hood is not wholly justifiable: so 
much a man may lay down without 
fear of public ribaldry ; for although we shake 
our heads over the change, we are not un- 
conscious of the manifold advantages of our 
new state. What we lose in generous im- 
pulse, we more than gain in the habit of gen- 
erously watching others ; and the capacity to 
enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost apti- 
tude for playing at soldiers. Terror is gone 
out of our lives, moreover ; we no longer see 
the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake 
to listen to the wind. We go to school no 
more; and if we have only exchanged one 
drudgery for another (which is by no means 
sure), we are set free for ever from the daily 
fear of chastisement. And yet a great change 
has overtaken us ; and although we do not en- 
joy ourselves less, at least we take our pleas- 
ure differently. We need pickles nowadays 

204 



CHILD'S PLAY 

to make Wednesday's cold mutton please 
our Friday's appetite; and I can remember 
the time when to call it red venison, and tell 
myself a hunter's story would have made it 
more palatable than the best of sauces. To 
the grown person, cold mutton is cold mut- 
ton all the world over; not all the mythology 
ever invented by man will make it better or 
worse to him ; the broad fad, the clamant re- 
ality, of the mutton carries away before it 
such sedudive figments. But for the child it 
is still possible to weave an enchantment 
over eatables; and if he has but read of a 
dish in a story-book, it will be heavenly 
manna to him for a week. 

If a grown man does not like eating and 
drinking and exercise, if he is not some- 
thing positive in his tastes, it means he has 
a feeble body and should have some medi- 
cine; but children may be pure spirits, if 
they will, and take their enjoyment in a 
world of moonshine. Sensation does not 
count for so much in our first years as after- 
wards; something of the swaddling numb- 
ness of infancy clings about us; we see and 
touch and hearthrough a sort of golden mist. 

205 



CHILD'S PLAY 

Children, for instance, are able enough to 
see, but they have no great fiiculty for look- 
ing; they do not use their eyes for the pleas- 
ure of using them, but for by-ends of their 
own; and the things 1 call to mind seeing 
most vividly, were not beautiful in them- 
selves, but merely interesting or enviable to 
me as I thought they might be turned to 
pradical account in play. Nor is the sense 
of touch so clean and poignant in children 
as it is in a man. If you will turn over your 
old memories, I think the sensations of this 
sort you remember will be somewhat vague, 
and come to not much more than a blunt, 
general sense of heat on summer days, or a 
blunt, general sense of wellbeing in bed. 
And here, of course, you will understand 
pleasurable sensations; for overmastering 
pain — the most deadly and tragical element 
in life, and the true commander of man's 
soul and body — alas ! pain has its own way 
with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, 
upon the fairy garden where the child wan- 
ders in a dream, no less surely than it rules 
upon the field of battle, or sends the immor- 
tal war-god whimpering to his father; and 
206 



CHILD'S PLAY 

innocence, no more than philosophy, can 
proted us from this sting. As for taste, 
when we bear in mind the excesses of un- 
mitigated sugar which delight a youthful 
palate, "it is surely no very cynical asper- 
ity " to think taste a character of the maturer 
growth. Smell and hearing are perhaps more 
developed; 1 remember many scents, many 
voices, and a great deal of spring singing in 
the woods. Buthearingiscapableof vast im- 
provement as a means of pleasure ; and there 
is all the world between gaping wonderment 
at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with 
which a man listens to articulate music. 

At the same time, and step by step with 
this increase in the definition and intensity 
of what we feel which accompanies our 
growing age, another change takes place in 
the sphere of intelled, by which all things 
are transformed and seen through theories 
and associations as through coloured win- 
dows. We make to ourselves day by day, 
out of history, and gossip, and economical 
speculations, and God knows what, a me- 
dium in which we walk and through which 
we look abroad. We study shop windows 

207 



CHILD'S PLAY 

with other eyes than in our childhood, never 
to wonder, not alwaysto admire, butto make 
and modify our little incongruous theories 
about life. It is no longer the uniform of a 
soldier that arrests our attention; but per- 
haps the flowing carriage of a woman, or 
perhaps a countenance that has been vividly 
stamped with passion and carries an adven- 
turous story written in its lines. The pleas- 
ure of surprise is passed away ; sugar-loaves 
and water-carts seem mighty tame to en- 
counter; and we walk the streets to make 
romances and to sociologize. Nor must we 
deny that a good many of us walk them solely 
for the purposes of transit or in the interest 
of a livelier digestion. These, indeed, may 
look back with mingled thoughts upon their 
childhood, but the rest are in a better case; 
they know more than when they were chil- 
dren, they understand better, their desires 
and sympathies answer more nimbly to the 
provocation of the senses, and their minds 
are brimming with interest as they go about 
the world. 

According to my contention, this is a 
flight to which children cannot rise. They 
208 



CHILD'S PLAY 

are wheeled in perambulators or dragged 
about by nurses in a pleasing stupor. A 
vague, faint, abiding wonderment possesses 
them. Here and there some specially remark- 
able circumstance, such as a water-cart or a 
guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of 
thought and calls them, for half a moment, 
out of themselves; and you may see them, 
still towed forward sideways by the inex- 
orable nurse as by a sort of destiny, but 
still staring at the bright objed in their 
wake. It may be some minutes before an- 
other such moving spedacle reawakens 
them to the world in which they dwell. 
For other children, they almost invariably 
show some intelhgent sympathy. " There is 
a fine fellow making mud pies," they seem 
to say; ''that I can understand, there is 
some sense in mud pies." But the doings of 
their elders, unless where they are speak- 
ingly pidluresque or recommend them- 
selves by the quality of being easily imitable, 
they let them go over their heads (as we say) 
without the least regard. If it were not for 
this perpetual imitation, we should be tempt- 
ed to fancy they despised us outright, or only 

209 



CHILD'S PLAY 

considered us in the light of creatures brutally 
strong and brutally silly ; among whom they 
condescended to dwell in obedience like a 
philosopher at a barbarous court. At times, 
indeed, they display an arrogance of disregard 
that is truly staggering. Once, when I was 
groaning aloud with physical pain, a young 
gentleman came into the room and non- 
chalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and 
arrow. He made no account of my groans, 
which he accepted, as he had to accept so 
much else, as a piece of the inexplicable 
condud of his elders ; and like a wise young 
gentleman, he would waste no wonder on 
the subjed. Those elders, who care so little 
for rational enjoyment, and are even the 
enemies of rational enjoyment for others, he 
had accepted without understanding and 
without complaint, as the rest of us accept 
the scheme of the universe. 

We grown people can tell ourselves a 
story, give and take strokes until the buck- 
lers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and 
die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire 
or lying prone in bed. This is exadly what 
a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, 

2IO 



CHILD'S PLAY 

when he can find anything else. He works 
all with lay figures and stage properties. 
When his story comes to the fighting, he 
must rise, get something by way of a sword 
and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, 
until he is out of breath. When he comes to 
ride with the king's pardon, he must be- 
stride a chair, which he will so hurry and 
belabour and on which he will so furiously 
demean himself, that the messenger will 
arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at least 
fiery red with haste. If his romance involves 
an accident upon a cHff, he must clamber in 
person about the chest of drawers and fall 
bodily upon the carpet, before his imagina- 
tion is satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, 
in short, are in the same category and 
answer the same end. Nothing can stagger 
a child's faith ; he accepts the clumsiest sub- 
stitutes and can swallow the most staring 
incongruities. The chair he has just been 
besieging as a castle, or valiantly cutting to 
the ground as a dragon, is taken away for 
the accommodation of a morning visitor, 
and he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish 
by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; 



CHILD'S PLAY 

in the midst of the enchanted pleasance, he 
can see, without sensible shock, the gar- 
dener soberly digging potatoes for the day's 
dinner. He can make abstraction of what- 
ever does not fit into his fable; and he puts 
his eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our 
noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is, 
that although the ways of children cross 
with those of their elders in a hundred places 
daily, they never go in the same diredion 
nor so much as lie in the same element. So 
may the telegraph wires intersed the line 
of the high-road, or so might a landscape 
painter and a bagman visit the same coun- 
try, and yet move in different worlds. 

People struck with these spedacles, cry 
aloud about the power of imagination in the 
young. Indeed there may be two words to 
that. It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian 
fancy that the child exhibits. It is the grown 
people who make the nursery stories ; all the 
children do, is jealously to preserve the text. 
One out of a dozen reasons why Robinson 
Crusoe should be so popular with youth, is 
that it hits their level in this matter to a 
nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts 



CHILD'S PLAY 

and had, in so many words, to play at a 
great variety of professions; and then the 
book is all about tools, and there is nothing 
that delights a child so much. Hammers and 
sav/s belong to a province of life that posi- 
tively calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical 
drama, surely of the most ancient Thespian 
model, wherein the trades of mankind are 
successively simulated to the running bur- 
then *' On a cold and frosty morning," gives 
a good instance of the artistic taste in chil- 
dren. And this need for over adion and lay 
figures testifies to a defefl in the child's im- 
agination which prevents him from carrying 
out his novels in the privacy of his own 
heart. He does not yet know enough of the 
world and men. His experience is incom- 
plete. That stage-wardrobe and scene-room 
that we call the memory is so ill provided, 
that he can overtake few combinations and 
body out few stories, to his own content, 
without some external aid. He is at the ex- 
perimental stage; he is not sure how one 
would feel in certain circumstances ; to make 
sure, he must come as near trying it as his 
means permit. And so here is young heroism 

213 



CHILD'S PLAY 

with a wooden sword, and mothers pradice 
their kind vocation over a bit of jointed 
stick. It may be laughable enough just now ; 
but it is these same people and these same 
thoughts, that not long hence, when they 
are on the theatre of life, will make you 
weep and tremble. For children think very 
much the same thoughts and dream the 
same dreams, as bearded men and marriage- 
able women. No one is more romantic. 
Fame and honour, the love of young men 
and the love of mothers, the business man's 
pleasure in method, all these and others they 
anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. 
Upon us, who are further advanced and 
fairly dealing with the threads of destiny, 
they only glance from time to time to glean 
a hint for their own mimetic reprodudion. 
Two children playing at soldiers are far more 
interesting to each other than one of the 
scarlet beings whom both are busy imitat- 
ing. This is perhaps the greatest oddity of 
all. ''Art for art" is their motto; and the 
doings of grown folk are only interesting as 
the raw material for play. Not Theophile 
Gautier, not Flaubert, can look more cal- 

214 



CHILD'S PLAY 

lously upon life, or rate the reproduftion 
more highly over the reality; and they will 
parody an execution, a deathbed, or the 
funeral of the young man of Nain, with all 
the cheerfulness in the world. 

The true parallel for play is not to be found, 
of course, in conscious art, which, though it 
be derived from play, is itself an abstra6l, 
impersonal thing, and depends largely upon 
philosophical interests beyond the scope of 
childhood. It is when we make castles in the 
air and personate the leading charader in 
our own romances, that we return to the 
spirit of our first years. Only, there are sev- 
eral reasons why the spirit is no longer so 
agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we 
admit this personal element into our diva- 
gations we are apt to stir up uncomfortable 
and sorrowful memories, and remind our- 
selves sharply of old wounds. Our day- 
dreams can no longer lie all in the air like a 
story in the Arabian Nights; they read to us 
rather like the history of a period in which 
we ourselves had taken part, where we come 
across many unfortunate passages and find 
our own condud smartly reprimanded. And 

315 



CHILD'S PLAY 

then the child, mind you, ads his parts. He 
does not merely repeat them to himself; he 
leaps, he runs, and sets the blood agog over 
all his body. And so his play breathes him; 
and he no sooner assumes a passion than he 
gives it vent. Alas! when we betake our- 
selves to our intelledual form of play, sitting 
quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed, we 
rouse many hot feelings for which we can 
find no outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable 
to the mature mind, which desires the thing 
itself; and even to rehearse a triumphant dia- 
logue with one's enemy, although it is per- 
haps the most satisfactory piece of play still 
left within our reach, it is not entirely satis- 
fying, and is even apt to lead to a visit and 
an interview which may be the reverse of 
triumphant after all. 

In the child's world of dim sensation, play 
is all in all. ''Making believe" is the gist of 
his whole life, and he cannot so much as 
take a walk except in charader. 1 could not 
learn my alphabet without some suitable 
mise-en-scene, and had to aft a business man 
in an office before I could sit down to my 
book. Will you kindly question your mem- 

2\6 



CHILD'S PLAY 

ory, and find out how much you did, work 
or pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and 
for how much you had to cheat yourself with 
some invention? I remember, as though it 
were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the 
dignity and self-reliance, that came with a 
pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when 
there was none to see. Children are even 
content to forego what we call the realities, 
and prefer the shadow to the substance. 
When they might be speaking intelligibly 
together, they chatter senseless gibberish by 
the hour, and are quite happy because they 
are making believe to speak French. I have 
said already how even the imperious appe- 
tite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and 
led by the nose with the fag end of an old 
song. And it goes deeper than this: when 
children are together even a meal is felt as 
an interruption in the business of hfe; and 
they must find some imaginative sandion, 
and tell themselves some sort of story, to 
account for, to colour, to render entertain- 
ing, the simple processes of eating and 
drinking. What wonderful fancies I have 
heard evolved out of the pattern upon tea- 

217 



CHILD'S PLAY 

cups! — from which there followed a code 
of rules and a whole world of excitement, 
until tea-drinking began to take rank as a 
game. When my cousin and 1 took our por- 
ridge of a morning, we had a device to en- 
liven the course of the meal. He ate his with 
sugar, and explained it to be a country con- 
tinually buried under snow. I took mine with 
milk, and explained it to be a country suf- 
fering gradual inundation. You can imagine 
us exchanging bulletins; how here was an 
island still unsubmerged, here a valley not 
yet covered with snow; what inventions 
were made; how his population lived in 
cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and 
how mine was always in boats; how the in- 
terest grew furious, as the last corner of safe 
ground was cut off on all sides and grew 
smaller every moment; and how, in fine, 
the food was of altogether secondary impor- 
tance, and might even have been nauseous, 
so long as we seasoned it with these dreams. 
But perhaps the most exciting moments I 
ever had over a meal, were in the case of 
calves' feet jelly. It was hardly possible not 
to believe — and you may be sure, so far from 
218 



CHILD'S PLAY 

trying, I did all 1 could to favour the illusion 
— that some part of it was hollow, and that 
sooner or later my spoon would lay open 
the secret tabernacle of the golden rock. 
There, might some miniature Red Beard 
await his hour; there, might one find the 
treasures of the Forty Thieves, and bewild- 
ered Cassim beating about the walls. And 
so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath, 
savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little 
palate left for the jelly; and though I pre- 
ferred the taste when I took cream with it, 1 
used often to go without, because the cream 
dimmed the transparent fradures. 

Even with games, this spirit is authorita- 
tive with right-minded children. It is thus 
that hide-and-seek has so pre-eminent a 
sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of ro- 
mance, and the a6lions and the excitement 
to which it gives rise lend themselves to 
almost any sort of fable. And thus cricket, 
which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably 
about nothing and for no end, often fails to 
satisfy infantile craving. It is a game, if you 
like, but not a game of play. You cannot tell 
yourself a story about cricket; and the adiv- 

219 



CHILD'S PLAY 

ityit calls forth can be justified on no rational 
theory. Even football, although it admirably 
simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of 
battle, has presented difficulties to the mind 
of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I 
knew at least one httle boy who was mightily 
exercised about the presence of the ball, and 
had to spirit himself up, whenever he came 
to play, with an elaborate story of enchant- 
ment, and take the missile as a sort of talis- 
man bandied about in conflict between two 
Arabian nations. 

To think of such a frame of mind, is to 
become disquieted about the bringing up of 
children. Surely they dwell in a mythologi- 
cal epoch, and are not the contemporaries of 
their parents. What can they think of them? 
what can they make of these bearded or 
petticoated giants who look down upon 
their games ^ who move upon -a cloudy 
Olympus, following unknown designs apart 
from rational enjoyment } who profess the 
tenderest solicitude for children, and yet 
every now and again reach down out of their 
altitude and terribly vindicate the preroga- 
tives of age .^ Off goes the child, corporally 



CHILD'S PLAY 

smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there 
ever such unthinkable deities as parents? I 
would give a great deal to know what, in 
nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvar- 
nished feeling. A sense of past cajolery ; a 
sense of personal attra6tion, at best very 
feeble; above all, 1 should imagine, a sense 
of terror for the untried residue of mankind ; 
go to make up the attraction that he feels. 
No wonder, poor little heart, with such a 
weltering world in front of him, if he clings 
to the hand he knows! The dread irration- 
ality of the whole affair, as it seems to chil- 
dren, is a thing we are all too ready to forget. 
**0, why," I remember passionately won- 
dering, ''why can we not all be happy and 
devote ourselves to play?" And when chil- 
dren do philosophise, I believe it is usually 
to very much the same purpose. 

One thing, at least, comes very clearly out 
of these considerations; that whatever we 
are to expect at the hands of children, it 
should not be any peddling exactitude about 
matters of fad. They walk in a vain show, 
and among mists and rainbows; they are 
passionate after dreams and unconcerned 



CHILD'S PLAY 

about realities; speech is a difficult art not 
wholly learned ; and there is nothing in their 
own tastes or purposes to teach them what 
we mean by abstrad truthfulness. When a 
bad writer is inexad, even if he can look 
back on half a century of years, we charge 
him with imcompetence and not with dis- 
honesty. And why not extend the same al- 
lowance to imperfed speakers? Let a stock- 
broker be dead stupid about poetry, or a 
poet inexad in the details of business, and 
we excuse them heartily from blame. But 
show us a miserable, unbreeched, human 
entity, whose whole profession it is to take 
a tub for a fortified town and a shaving-brush 
for the deadly stiletto, and who passes three- 
fourths of his time in a dream and the rest 
in open self-deception, and we exped him 
to be as nice upon a matter of fad as a scien- 
tific expert bearing evidence. Upon my 
heart, I think it less than decent. You do not 
consider how little the child sees, or how 
swift he is to weave what he has seen into 
bewildering fidion; and that he cares no 
more for what you call truth, than you for 
a gingerbread dragoon. 

222 



CHILD'S PLAY 

I am reminded, as I write, that the child 
is very inquiring as to the precise truth of 
stories. But indeed this is a very different 
matter, and one bound up with the subjed 
of play, and the precise amount of playful- 
ness, or playability, to be looked for in the 
world. Many such burning questions must 
arise in the course of nursery education. 
Among the fauna of this planet, which al- 
ready embraces the pretty soldier and the 
terrifying Irish beggarman, is, or is not, the 
child to exped a Bluebeard or a Cormoran? 
Is he, or is he not, to look out for magicians, 
kindly and potent? May he, or may he not, 
reasonably hope to be cast away upon a 
desert island, or turned to such diminutive 
proportions that he can live on equal terms 
with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in his 
own toy schooner? Surely all these are prac- 
tical questions to a neophyte entering upon 
life with a view to play. Precision upon such 
a point, the child can understand. But if you 
merely ask him of his past behaviour, as to 
who threw such a stone, for instance, or 
struck such and such a match; or whether 
he had looked into a parcel or gone by a for- 

223 



CHILD'S PLAY 

bidden path, — why, he can see no moment 
in the inquiry, and it is ten to one, he has 
already half forgotten and half bemused him- 
self with subsequent imaginings. 

It would be easy to leave them in their 
native cloudland, where they figure so pret- 
tily — pretty like flowers and innocent like 
dogs. They will come out of their gardens 
soon enough, and have to go into offices and 
the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O 
conscientious parent! Let them doze among 
their playthings yet a little! for who knows 
what a rough, warfaring existence lies be- 
fore them in the future ? 




224 




WALKING TOURS 

[T must not be imagined that a 
walking tour, as some would have 
us fancy, is merely a better or worse 
way of seeing the country. There are many 
ways of seeing landscape quite as good ; and 
none more vivid, in spite of canting dilet- 
tantes, than from a railway train. But land- 
scape or a walking tour is quite accessory. 
He who is indeed of the brotherhood does 
not voyage in quest of the piduresque, but 
of certain jolly humours — of the hope and 
spirit with which the march begins at morn- 
ing, and the peace and spiritual repletion of 
the evening's rest. He cannot tell whether 
he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with 
more delight. The excitement of the depar- 
ture puts him in key for that of the arrival. 
Whatever he does is not only a reward in 
itself, but will be further rewarded in the 
sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure 
in an endless chain. It is this that so few can 

225 



WALKING TOURS 

understand ; they will either be always loung- 
ing or always at five miles an hour; they do 
not play off the one against the other, pre- 
pare all day for the evening, and all evening 
for the next day. And, above all, it is here 
that your overwalker fails of comprehension. 
His heart rises against those who drink their 
cura^oa in liqueur glasses, when he himself 
can swill it in a brown John. He will not be- 
lieve that the flavour is more delicate in the 
smaller dose. He will not believe that to 
walk this unconscionable distance is merely 
to stupefy and brutalise himself, and come 
to his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on 
his five wits, and a starless night of dark- 
ness in his spirit. Not for him the mild lu- 
minous evening of the temperate walker! 
He has nothing left of man but a physical 
need for bedtime and a double nightcap ; and 
even his pipe, if he be a smoker, will be 
savourless and disenchanted. It is the fate of 
such an one to take twice as much trouble 
as is needed to obtain happiness, and miss 
the happiness in the end; he is the man of 
the proverb, in short, who goes further and 
fares worse. 
226 



WALKING TOURS 

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking 
tour should be gone upon alone. If you go 
in a company, or even in pairs, it is no 
longer a walking tour in anything but name ; 
it is something else and more in the nature 
of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone 
upon alone, because freedom is of the es- 
sence; because you should be able to stop 
and go on, and follow this way or that, as 
the freak takes you; and because you must 
have your own pace, and neither trot along- 
side a champion walker, nor mince in time 
with a girl. And then you must be open to 
all impressions and let your thoughts take 
colour from what you see. You should be as 
a pipe for any wind to play upon. " I can- 
not see the wit," says Hazlitt, *' of walking 
and talking at the same time. When I am in 
the country I wish to vegetate like the coun- 
try,"— which is the gist of all that can be 
said upon the matter. There should be no 
cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the 
meditative silence of the morning. And so 
long as a man is reasoning he cannot sur- 
render himself to that fine intoxication that 
comes of much motion in the open air, that 

227 



WALKING TOURS 

begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness 
of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes 
comprehension. 

During the first day or so of any tour there 
are moments of bitterness, when the travel- 
ler feels more than coldly towards his knap- 
sack, when he is half in a mind to throw it 
bodily over the hedge and, like Christian on 
a similar occasion, ''give three leaps and go 
on singing."And yet it soon acquires a prop- 
erty of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the 
spirit of the journey enters into it. And no 
sooner have you passed the straps over your 
shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared 
from you, you pull yourself together with a 
shake, and fall at once into your stride. And 
surely, of all possible moods, this, in which 
a man takes the road, is the best. Of course, 
if he will keep thinking of his anxieties, if 
he will open the merchant Abudah's chest 
and walk arm-in-arm with the hag — why, 
wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or 
slow, the chances are that he will not be 
happy. Andso much the more shame to him- 
self! There are perhaps thirty men setting 
forth at that same hour, and 1 would lay a 
228 



WALKING TOURS 

large wager there is not another dull face 
among the thirty. It would be a fine thing 
to follow, in a coat of darkness, one after 
another of these wayfarers, some summer 
morning, for the first few miles upon the 
road. This one, who walks fast, with a keen 
look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his 
own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving 
and weaving, to set the landscape to words. 
This one peers about, as he goes, among the 
grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the 
dragon-flies ; he leans on the gate of the pas- 
ture, and cannot look enough upon the com- 
placent kine. And here comes another, talk- 
ing, laughing, and gesticulating to himself 
His face changes from time to time, as indig- 
nation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds 
his forehead. He is composing articles, de- 
livering orations, and conducing the most 
impassioned interviews, by the way. A little 
farther on, and it is as like as not he will be- 
gin to sing. And well for him, supposing him 
to be no great master in that art, if he stum- 
ble across no stolid peasant at a corner; for 
on such an occasion, I scarcely know which 
is the more troubled, or whether it is worse 



WALKING TOURS 

to suffer the confusion of your troubadour, 
or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A 
sedentary population, accustomed, besides, 
to the strange mechanical bearing of the 
common tramp, can in no wise explain to 
itself the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew 
one man who was arrested as a runaway 
lunatic, because, although a full-grown per- 
son with a red beard, he skipped as he went 
like a child. And you would be astonished if 
I were to tell you all the grave and learned 
heads who have confessed to me that, when 
on walking tours, they sang — and sang very 
ill — and had a pair of red ears when, as 
described above, the inauspicious peasant 
plumped into their arms from round a cor- 
ner. And here, lest you should think I am 
exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, 
from his essay On Going a Journey, which 
is so good that there should be a tax levied 
on all who have not read it: — 

"Give me the clear blue sky over my 
head," says he, ''and the green turf beneath 
my feet, a winding road before me, and a 
three hours' march to dinner — and then to 
thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some 
230 



WALKING TOURS 

game on these lone heaths. I laugh, 1 run, I 
leap, I sing for joy." 

Bravo ! After that adventure of my friend 
with the policeman, you would not have 
cared, would you, to publish that in the first 
person ? But we have no bravery nowadays, 
and, even in books, must all pretend to be 
as dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was 
not so with HazHtt. And notice how learned 
he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in 
the theory of walking tours. He is none of 
your athletic men in purple stockings, who 
walk their fifty miles a day: three hours' 
march is his ideal. And then he must have 
a winding road, the epicure! 

Yet there is one thing 1 objed to in these 
words of his, one thing in the great master's 
pra<5lice that seems to me not wholly wise. 
I do not approve of that leaping and run- 
ning. Both of these hurry the respiration; 
they both shake up the brain out of its glori- 
ous open-air confusion ; and they both break 
the pace. Uneven walking is not so agree- 
able to the body, and it distrads and irri- 
tates the mind. Whereas, when once you 
have fallen into an equable stride, it requires 

2;i 



WALKING TOURS 

no conscious thought from you to keep it 
up, and yet it prevents you from thinking 
earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, 
like the work of a copying clerk, it gradu- 
ally neutralises and sets to sleep the serious 
adivity of the mind. We can think of this 
or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child 
thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; 
we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, 
and trifle in a thousand ways with words 
and rhymes; but when it comes to honest 
work, when we come to gather ourselves 
together for an effort, we may sound the 
trumpet as loud and long as we please; the 
great barons of the mind will not rally to the 
standard, but sit, each one, at home, warm- 
ing his hands over his own fire and brood- 
ing on his own private thought! 

In the course of a day's walk, you see, 
there is much variance in the mood. From 
the exhilaration of the start, to the happy 
phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly 
great. As the day goes on, the traveller 
moves from the one extreme towards the 
other. He becomes more and more incor- 
porated with the material landscape, and the 
232 



WALKING TOURS 

open-air drunkenness grows upon him with 
great strides, until he posts along the road, 
and sees everything about him, as in a cheer- 
ful dream. The first is certainly brighter, but 
the second stage is the more peaceful. A 
man does not make so many articles to- 
wards the end, nor does he laugh aloud; 
but the purely animal pleasures, the sense of 
physical wellbeing, the delight of every in- 
halation, of every time the muscles tighten 
down the thigh, console him for the ab- 
sence of the others, and bring him to his 
destination still content. 

Nor must I forget to say a word on biv- 
ouacs. You come to a milestone on a hill, or 
some place where deep ways meet under 
trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down 
you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You 
sink into yourself, and the birds come round 
and look at you; and your smoke dissipates 
upon the afternoon under the blue dome of 
heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your 
feet, and the cool air visits your neck and 
turns aside your open shirt. If you are not 
happy, you must have an evil conscience. 
You may dally as long as you like by the 

2.53 



WALKING TOURS 

roadside. It is almost as if the millennium 
were arrived, when we shall throw our 
clocks and watches over the housetop, and 
remember time and seasons no more. Not 
to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going 
to say, to live for ever. You have no idea, 
unless you have tried it, how endlessly long 
is a summer's day, that you measure out 
only by hunger, and bring to an end only 
when you are drowsy. I know a village 
where there are hardly any clocks, where 
no one knows more of the days of the week 
than by a sort of instind for the fete on Sun- 
days, and where only one person can tell 
you the day of the month, and she is gen- 
erally wrong ; and if people were aware how 
slow Time journeyed in that village, and 
what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over 
and above the bargain, to its wise inhabi- 
tants, I beheve there would be a stampede 
out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a va- 
riety of large towns, where the clocks lose 
their heads, and shake the hours out each 
one faster than the other, as though they 
were all in a wager. And all these foolish 
pilgrims would each bring his own misery 

234 



WALKING TOURS 

along with him, in a watch-pocket! It 
is to be noticed, there were no clocks and 
watches in the much-vaunted days before 
the flood. It follows, of course, there were 
no appointments, and punfluality was not 
yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a 
covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, 
"he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot de- 
prive him of his covetousness." And so I 
would say of a modern man of business, 
you may do what you will for him, put him 
in Eden, give him the elixir of life — he has 
still a fl?w at heart, he still has his business 
habits. Now, there is no time when busi- 
ness habits are more mitigated than on a 
walking tour. And so, during these halts, as 
I say, you will feel almost free. 

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the 
best hour comes. There are no such pipes to 
be smoked as those that follow a good day's 
march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing 
to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, 
so full and so fine. If you wind up the eve- 
ning with grog, you will own there was 
never such grog; at every sip a jocund 
tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and 

255 



WALKING TOURS 

sits easily in your heart. If you read a book 
— and you will never do so save by fits 
and starts — you find the language strangely 
racy and harmonious; words take a new 
meaning; single sentences possess the ear 
for half an hour together; and the writer 
endears himself to you, at every page, by 
the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It seems 
as if it were a book you had written your- 
self in a dream. To all we have read on such 
occasions we look back with special favour. 
"It was on the loth of April, 1798," says 
Hazlitt, with amorous precision, " that I 
sat down to a volume of the new Heloise, 
at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of 
sherry and a cold chicken." 1 should wish to 
quote more, for though we are mighty fine 
fellows nowadays, we cannot write like 
Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of 
Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket- 
book on such a journey ; so would a volume 
of Heine's songs; and for Tristram Shandy 
I can pledge a fair experience. 

If the evening be fine and warm, there is 
nothing better in life than to lounge before 
the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the 
236 



WALKING TOURS 

parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds 
and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that 
you taste Joviality to the full significance of 
that audacious word. Your muscles are so 
agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so 
strong and so idle, that whether you move 
or sit still, whatever you do is done with 
pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You 
fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, 
drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot 
walk purged you, more than ofanythingelse, 
of all narrowness and pride, and left curios- 
ity to play its part freely, as in a child or a 
man of science. You lay aside all your own 
hobbies, to watch provincial humours de- 
velop themselves before you, now as a laugh- 
able farce, and now grave and beautiful like 
an old tale. 

Or perhaps you are left to your own com- 
pany for the night, and surly weather im- 
prisons you by the fire. You may remem- 
ber how Burns, numbering past pleasures, 
dwells upon the hours when he has been 
"happy thinking." It is a phrase that may 
well perplex a poor modern, girt about on 
every side by clocks and chimes, and haunt- 

237 



WALKING TOURS 

ed, even at night, by flaming dial-plates. For 
we are all so busy, and have so many far- 
off projeds to realise, and castles in the fire to 
turn into sohd habitable mansions on a gravel 
soil, that we can find no time for pleasure 
trips into the Land of Thought and among 
the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, 
when we must sit all night, beside the fire, 
with folded hands; and a changed world 
for most of us, when we find we can pass 
the hours without discontent, and be happy 
thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, 
to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make 
our voice audible a moment in the derisive 
silence of eternity, that we forget that one 
thing, of which these are but the parts — 
namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink 
hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like 
frightened sheep. And now you are to ask 
yourself if, when all is done, you would not 
have been better to sit by the fire at home, 
and be happy thinking. To sit still and con- 
template, — to rememberthe faces of women 
without desire, to be pleased by the great 
deeds of men without envy, to be everything 
andeverywhereinsympathy,andyetcontent 



WALKING TOURS 

to remain where and what you are — is not 
this to know both wisdom and virtue, and 
to dwell with happiness? After all, it is not 
they who carry flags, but they who look up- 
on it from a private chamber, who have the 
fun of the procession. And once you are at 
that, you are in the very humour of all social 
heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, 
empty words. If you ask yourself what you 
mean by fame, riches, or learning, the an- 
swer is far to seek ; and you go back into that 
kingdom of light imaginations, which seem 
so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring 
after wealth, and so momentous to those who 
are stricken with the disproportions of the 
world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, 
cannot stop to split differences between two 
degrees of the infmitesimally small, such as 
a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a mil- 
lion of money or a fiddlestick's end. 

You lean from the window, your last pipe 
reeking whitely into the darkness, your body 
full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned 
in the seventh circle of content; when sud- 
denly the mood changes, the weather-cock 
goes about, and you ask yourself one ques- 



WALKING TOURS 

tion more: whether, for the interval, you 
havebeenthe wisest philosopheror the most 
egregious of donkeys? Human experience is 
not yet able to reply ; but at least you have 
had a fine moment, and looked down upon 
all the kingdoms of the earth. And whether 
it was wise orfoolish, to-morrow's travel will 
carry you, body and mind, into some differ- 
ent parish of the infinite. 




240 




PAN'S PIPES 

HE world in which we live has been 
variously said and sung by the most 
ingenious poets and philosophers: 
these reducing it to formulae and chemical 
ingredients, those striking the lyre in high- 
sounding measures for the handiwork of 
God. What experience supplies is of a min- 
gled tissue, and the choosing mind has much 
to rejed before it can get together the ma- 
terials of a theory. Dew and thunder, destroy- 
ing Atilla and the Spring lambkins, belongto 
an order of contrasts which no repetition can 
assimilate. There is an uncouth, outlandish 
strain throughout the web of the world, as 
from a vexatious planet in the house of life. 
Things are not congruous and wear strange 
disguises: the consummate flower is fos- 
tered out of dung, and after nourishing itself 
awhile with heaven's delicate distillations, 
decays again into indistinguishable soil; and 
with Caesar's ashes, Hamlet tells us, the ur- 

241 



PAN'S PIPES 

chins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their 
countenance. Nay, the kindly shine of sum- 
mer, when tracked home with the scientific 
spyglass, is found to issue from the most 
portentous nightmare of the universe — the 
great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell's 
squibs, tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical 
to life. The sun itself is enough to disgust a 
human being of the scene which he inhabits; 
and you would not fancy there was a green 
or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully 
lighted up. And yet it is by the blaze of such 
a conflagration, to which the fire of Rome 
was but a spark, that we do all our fiddhng, 
and hold domestic tea-parties at the arbour 
door. 

The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, 
now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies 
were dispersed; now by the woodside on a 
summer noon trolling on his pipe until he 
charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen. 
And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the 
last word of human experience. To certain 
smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and 
elastic aethers, and the hypothesis of this or 
that other spe6lacled professor, tell a speak- 
242 



PAN'S PIPES 

ing story; but for youth and all dudile and 
congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all 
the classic hierarchy alone survives in tri- 
umph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an 
angry look, the type of the shaggy world: 
and in every wood, if you go with a spirit 
properly prepared, you shall hear the note 
of his pipe. 

For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded 
with gardens; where the salt and tumbling 
sea receives clear rivers running from among 
reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic 
world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is 
it the birds sing among the trees in pairing- 
time ? What means the sound of the rain 
falling far and wide upon the leafy forest ? 
To what tune does the fisherman whistle, 
as he hauls in his net at morning, and the 
bright fish are heaped inside the boat } These 
are all airs upon Pan's pipe; he it was who 
gave them breath in the exultation of his 
heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow 
with his lips and fingers. The coarse mirth 
of herdsmen, shaking the dells with laughter 
and striking out high echoes from the rock; 
the tune of moving feet in the lamplit city, 

243 



PAN'S PIPES 

or on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves 
of many horses, beating the wide pastures 
in alarm; the song of hurrying rivers; the 
colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live 
touch of hands; and the voice of things, and 
their significant look, and the renovating in- 
fluence they breathe forth — these are his 
joyful measures, to which the whole earth 
treads in choral harmony. To this music the 
young lambs bound as to a tabor, and the 
London shop-girl skips rudely in the dance. 
For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; 
and to look on the happy side of nature is 
common, in their hours, to all created things. 
Some are vocal under a good influence, are 
pleasing whenever they are pleased, and 
hand on their happiness to others, as a child 
who, looking upon lovely things, looks 
lovely. Some leap to the strains with unapt 
foot, and make a halting figure in the uni- 
versal dance. And some, like sour spectators 
at the play, receive the music into their 
hearts with an unmoved countenance, and 
walk like strangers through the general re- 
joicing. But let him feign never so carefully, 
there is not a man but has his pulses shaken 
244 



PAN'S PIPES 

when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and 
sets the world a-singing. 

Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the 
air is changed; and in the screech of the 
night wind, chasing navies, subverting the 
tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; 
in the random deadly levin or the fury of 
headlong floods, we recognize the ''dread 
foundation " of life and the anger in Pan's 
heart. Earth wages open war against her 
children, and under her softest touch hides 
treacherous claws. The cool waters invite 
us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns 
up in the hour of sleep, and makes an end 
of all. Everything is good or bad, helpful or 
deadly, not in itself, but by its circumstances. 
For a few bright days in England the hurri- 
cane must break forth and the North Sea pay 
a toll of populous ships. And when the uni- 
versal music has led lovers into the paths of 
dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, 
suddenly the air shifts into a minor, and 
death makes a clutch from his ambuscade 
below the bed of marriage. For death is 
given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are 
fatal; and into this life, where one thing 

245 



PAN'S PIPES 

preys upon another, the child too often 
makes its entrance from the mother's corpse. 
It is no wonder, with so traitorous a scheme 
of things, if the wise people who created 
for us the idea of Pan thought that of all 
fears the fear of him was the most terrible, 
since it embraces all. And still we preserve 
the phrase : a panic terror. To reckon dangers 
too curiously, to hearken too intently for the 
threat that runs through all the winning 
music of the world, to hold back the hand 
from the rose because of the thorn, and from 
life because of death : this it is to be afraid of 
Pan. Highly respedable citizens who flee 
life'spleasures and responsibilities and keep, 
with upright hat, upon the midway of cus- 
tom, avoiding the right hand and the left, 
the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised 
they would be if they could hear their atti- 
tude mythologically expressed, and knew 
themselves as tooth-chattering ones, who 
flee from Nature because they fear the hand 
of Nature's God! Shrilly sound Pan's pipes; 
and behold the banker instantly concealed 
in the bank parlour! For to distrust one's 
impulses is to be recreant to Pan. 
246 



PAN'S PIPES 

There are moments when the mind re- 
fuses to be satisfied with evolution, and de- 
mands a ruddier presentation of the sum of 
man's experience. Sometimes the mood is 
brought about by laughter at the humorous 
side of life, as when, abstrading ourselves 
from earth, we imagine people plodding on 
foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, 
with the planet all the while whirling in the 
opposite diredion, so that, for all their hurry, 
they travel back-foremost through the uni- 
verse of space. Sometimes it comes by the 
spirit of delight, and sometimes by the spirit 
of terror. At least, there will always be hours 
when we refuse to be put off by the feint 
of explanation, nicknamed science; and de- 
mand instead some palpitating image of our 
estate, that shall represent the troubled and 
uncertain element in which we dwell, and 
satisfy reason by the means of art. Science 
writes of the world as if with the cold fmger 
of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it 
when compared to the reality of which it 
discourses.^ where hearts beat high in April, 
and death strikes, and hills totter in the 
earthquake, and there is a glamour over all 

247 



PAN'S PIPES 

the objeds of sight, and a thrill in all noises 
for the ear, and Romance herself has made 
her dwelling among men? So we come 
back to the old myth, and hear the goat- 
footed piper making the music which is it- 
self the charm and terror of things; and 
when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, 
fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious 
tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the 
thunder of the catarad, tell ourselves that he 
has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket. 




248 




A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

'ITIESgiven, the problem was tolight 
them. How to condud individual 
citizens about the burgess-warren, 
when once heaven had withdrawn its lead- 
ing luminary ? or — since we live in a scien- 
tific age — when once our spinning planet 
has turned its back upon the sun ? The 
moon, from time to time, was doubtless 
very helpful; the stars had a cheery look 
among the chimney-pots ; and a cresset here 
and there, on church or citadel, produced a 
fme pi6lorial effed, and, in places where the 
ground lay unevenly, held out the right hand 
of condud to the benighted. But sun, moon, 
and stars abstracted or concealed, the night- 
faring inhabitant had to fall back — we speak 
on the authority of old prints — upon stable 
lanthorns, two stories in height. Many holes, 
drilled in the conical turret-roof of this vaga- 
bond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement 
into the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth 

249 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

in the ghostly darkness, carrying his own 
sun by a ring about his finger, day and 
night swung to and fro and up and down 
about his footsteps. Blackness haunted his 
path ; he was beleaguered by goblins as he 
went; and, curfew being struck, he found 
no light but that he travelled in throughout 
the township. 

Closely following on this epoch of migra- 
tory lanthorns in a world of extin6lion, came 
the era of oil-lights, hard to kindle, easy to 
extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour 
of their endurance. Rudely puffed the winds 
of heaven; roguishly clomb up the all-de- 
strudive urchin ; and, lo ! in a moment night 
re-established her void empire, and the cit 
groped along the wall, suppered but bedless, 
occult from guidance, and sorrily wading 
in the kennels- As if gamesome winds and 
gamesome youths were not sufficient, it 
was the habit to sling these feeble luminaries 
from house to house above the fairway! 
There, on invisible cordage, let them swing! 
And suppose some crane-necked general to 
go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring 
thedestiny of nations, red-hot in expedition, 
250 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

there would indubitably be some effusion of 
military blood, and oaths, and a certain crash 
of glass; and while the chieftain rode for- 
ward with a purple coxcomb, the street 
would be left to original darkness, unpiloted, 
unvoyageable, a province of the desert night. 
The conservative, looking before and 
after, draws from each contemplation the 
matter for content. Out of the age of gas 
lamps he glances back slightingly at the 
mirk and glimmer in which his ancestors 
wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the 
contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a stave, 
in the highest style of poetry, lauding pro- 
gress and the golden mean. When gas first 
spread along a city, mapping it forth about 
evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new 
age had begun for sociality and corporate 
pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper 
circumstance, becoming its own birthright. 
The work of Prometheus had advanced by 
another stride. Mankind and its supper par- 
ties were no longer at the mercy of a few 
miles ofsea-fog; sundown no longer emptied 
the promenade; and the day was length- 
ened out to every man's fancy. The city-folk 

251 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

had stars of their own; biddable, domesti- 
cated stars. 

It is true that these were not so steady, 
nor yet so clear, as their originals; nor in- 
deed was their lustre so elegant as that of 
the best wax candles. But then the gas 
stars, being nearer at hand, were more prac- 
tically efficacious than Jupiter himself. It is 
true, again, that they did not unfold their 
rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the 
planets, coming out along the firmament 
one after another, as the need arises. But the 
lamplighters took to their heels every eve- 
ning, and ran with a good heart. It was 
pretty to see man thus emulating the pundu- 
ality of heaven's orbs ; and though perfedion 
was not absolutely reached, and now and 
then an individual may have been knocked 
on the head by the ladder of the flying func- 
tionary, yet people commended his zeal in 
a proverb, and taught their children to say, 
**God bless the lamplighter! " And since 
his passage was a piece of the day's pro- 
gramme, the children were well pleased to 
repeat the benedidion, not, of course, in so 
many words, which would have been im- 
252 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

proper, but in some chaste circumlocution, 
suitable for infant lips. 

God bless him, indeed! For the term of 
his twilight diligence is near at hand; and 
for not much longer shall we watch him 
speeding up the street and, at measured in- 
tervals, knocking another luminous hole 
into the dusk. The Greeks would have made 
a noble myth of such an one; how he dis- 
tributed starlight, and, as soon as the need 
was over, re-colleded it ; and the little bull's- 
eye, which was his instrument, and held 
enough fire to kindle a whole parish, would 
have been fitly commemorated in the legend. 
Now, like all heroic tasks, his labours draw 
towards apotheosis, and in the light of vic- 
tory himself shall disappear. For another ad- 
vance has been efifeded. Our tame stars are 
to come out in future, not one by one, but 
all in a body and at once. A sedate eleftri- 
cian somewhere in a back office touches a 
spring — and behold! from one end to an- 
other of the city, from east to west, from the 
Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is 
light! Fiat Lux, says the sedate eledrician. 
What a spedacle, on some clear, dark night- 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

fall, from the edge of Hampstead Hill, when 
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the 
design of the monstrous city flashes into 
vision — a glittering hieroglyph many square 
miles in extent; and when, to borrow and 
debase an image, all the evening street- 
lamps burst together into song! Such is the 
spectacle of the future, preluded the other 
day by the experiment in Pall Mall. Star-rise 
by eledricity, the most romantic flight of 
civilisation ; the compensatory benefit for an 
innumerable array of factories and bankers' 
clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised about 
Thirlmere, here is a crumb of consolation; 
consolatory at least, to such of them as look 
out upon the world through seeing eyes, 
and contentedly accept beauty where it 
comes. 

But the conservative, while lauding pro- 
gress, is ever timid of innovation ; his is the 
hand upheld to counsel pause ; his is the sig- 
nal advising slow advance. The word elec- 
tricity now sounds the note of danger. In 
Paris, at the mouth of the Passage des 
Princes, in the place before the Opera por- 
tico, and in the Rue Drouot at the Figaro 
254 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

office, a new sort of urban star now shines 
out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious 
to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! 
Such a light as this should shine only on 
murders and public crime, or along the 
corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to 
heighten horror. To look at it only once is 
to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm 
domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, 
you would have thought, might have re- 
mained content with what Prometheus 
stole for them and not gone fishing the pro- 
found heaven with kites to catch and do- 
mesticate the wildfire of the storm. Yet here 
we have the levin brand at our doors, and 
it is proposed that we should henceforward 
take our walks abroad in the glare of per- 
manent lightning. A man need not be very 
superstitious if he scruple to follow his pleas- 
ures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, 
nor very epicurean if he prefer to see the 
face of beauty more becomingly displayed. 
That ugly blinding glare may not improp- 
erly advertise the home of slanderous Fi- 
garo, which is a backshop to the infernal re- 
gions; but where soft joys prevail, where 

255 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

people are convoked to pleasure and th( 
philosopher looks on sr "ng and silent 
where love and laughter . nfying win( 

abound, there, at least, let th mild lustn 

shine upon the ways of man. 




256 



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